Following the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, the Prime Minister’s Office issued an official statement from Justin Trudeau that garnered immediate criticism.

In the statement, Trudeau said that “it is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.”

Trudeau went on to say that, while Castro was “a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante’.”

The statement also noted Castro was “a legendary revolutionary and orator,” and “a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century.”

It was roundly condemned, including by former Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, a Cuban American.

Is this a real statement or a parody? Because if this is a real statement from the PM of Canada it is shameful & embarrassing. https://t.co/lFXeqU7Ws0

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/trudeaueulogies-trends-after-controversial-castro-statement/feed/7How to treat a Twitter trollhttp://www.macleans.ca/society/how-to-treat-a-twitter-troll/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/how-to-treat-a-twitter-troll/#commentsMon, 21 Nov 2016 19:34:29 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=953057A study looking for a remedy for abusive Twitter users reveals their psychology, and explains what their vitriol has in common with gang signs

In this July 27, 2016, file photo, the Twitter symbol appears above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

There’s a new study out that reads like the script of a high-brow nature film where a plummy-accented narrator explains the motives and aggressions of a species in its natural habitat. The habitat here is online:“Tweetment Effects on the Tweeted: Experimentally Reducing Racist Harassment,” from the current issue of the journal Political Behavior.

Kevin Munger, a PhD student in the department of politics at New York University, set out to see if there was a “treatment” for Twitter users who made racist comments. “The rise of online social interaction has brought with it new opportunities for individuals to express their prejudices and engage in verbal harassment,” he writes.So he started by seeking out the worst of the worst to test his hypotheses—in research parlance, a “hard case”—by targeting users who lobbed the word “n—-r” directly at another person. “In the racial context of the United States, this term is almost certainly the most intrinsically offensive,” he writes, and that leaves “no doubt” that people who aim that word at someone else know exactly what they’re doing. Then, because they are the largest and most relevant group directing online harassment at African-Americans—and in order to ensure the effect of his interventions didn’t vary with his subjects’ race or sex—Munger limited his sample to white men.

Once he found a tweet containing the N-word, he compared the user’s 1,000 most recent tweets to a custom “dictionary” containing a bloodcurdling array of racist and graphically sexual terms. An algorithm generated an “offensiveness score” for each user, and anyone who fell below the 75th percentile, as determined by a random sample of 450 Twitter users, was excluded from the study; in concrete terms, at least three per cent of a user’s tweets had to contain an offensive word. “It was basically to ensure that this is a certain type of person,” Munger says. He also manually reviewed tweets containing the N-word, to ensure that the Twitter users involved weren’t friends, for instance, or that the term was being used in a less vicious context.

Then, the crux of the experiment: Munger created sock-puppet Twitter accounts to respond to his subjects. Within 24 hours of someone in the study tweeting the N-word at someone else, one of the researcher’s shadow accounts would reply to the offending person: “Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language.”

Munger’s bots had four distinct identities: a white guy (as indicated by a stereotypically white name—Greg—and a Caucasian cartoon avatar) with fewer than 10 followers; a white guy with more than 500 followers; a black guy (with a name that read as black—Rasheed—and a dark-skinned avatar) with few followers; and a black guy with lots of followers. This was meant to test “in-group or out-group sanctioning”: in essence, we all look for cues about what behaviour is acceptable in our social groups, and we learn more about that from someone like us than someone different, so we pay more attention to those like us. Munger also took great pains to ensure his bot accounts looked authentic, and indeed, only three of the 242 subjects he replied to accused him of using a fake account.

Munger hypothesized that the most effective messages to racist white users would come from someone white (like them) who had a lot of followers—or in the parlance of the study, “high status” in terms of perceived influence on Twitter. That proved true: while he saw some reduction in subsequent racist tweets from subjects across all conditions in the study, the only users who showed statistically significant changes in behaviour were those who got called out by white, high-follower Twitter accounts. The 50 subjects in that group used the N-word an estimated 186 fewer times in the month after treatment. That amounts to 0.3 fewer utterances of that word, per user, per day.

Munger measured the effects on racist tweeters’ behaviour one week, two weeks and one month out. Interestingly, he saw smaller-than-expected effects in the immediate aftermath of a user being called out, even if they later toned down their racist language. The study author believes “reactance” is what underlies that pattern. “If you feel like someone is trying to constrain your choices, you can react very negatively against that,” he says. “For some of the subjects—though they did ultimately change their behaviour to use less racist language—initially they were defensive, and in doing so, they yelled at bots a lot.” One particularly dedicated troll took an all-caps run at a bot twice, using language that would, frankly, render the sentences gibberish if they were reproduced here with the most vulgar language replaced with asterisks.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Munger’s study is how anonymity figured into it. He hypothesized that anonymous accounts would be less affected by “treatment” than those with a real name or photo attached, because he figured they just didn’t care what anyone thought. It turned out the opposite was true: only anonymous Twitter users reduced their racist abuse after being told off. “It was in fact the people who were using their real identities online who were not paying attention to what people told them to do, probably because they’re willing to put their real name associated with this sort of behaviour,” Munger says. “They’re pretty clearly committed to it.”

This can also be explained by the “social identity model of deindividuation effects,” or “SIDE theory,” Munger explains. That tells us that as people’s individual identities become less prominent—by, for instance, operating as a nameless, faceless account on Twitter or elsewhere online—their sense of group belonging becomes more important to them. That makes them more susceptible to messages about group norms or anything else that shores up their identity as part of a subculture.

And that’s another area where Munger’s paper feels like a deep-dive into the psyche and conduct of the darkest underbelly of Twitter. “The reason a lot of online groups use extreme language is because it’s useful for them to define their group identities this way. It’s a signal to outsiders,” he says. “Think about gang members who have their gang sign tattooed on their face…to a lesser extent, the use of extreme language online serves a similar function.”

Munger hasn’t tested this, but he strongly suspects that calling someone out with a more direct, scolding message such as “You’re being racist” wouldn’t be as effective. He carefully calibrated his sanctioning message to be low-key and collegial in tone, right down to the “Hey man” opening, which was meant to invoke the shared masculinity of the racist tweeter and the faux-account calling them out.

Of course, Twitter being Twitter, even that phrasing became fodder for more obnoxiousness. “I think that might have been a mistake,” Munger says, chuckling. “Many of the subjects actually made fun of me for that kind of language.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/how-to-treat-a-twitter-troll/feed/3Why the death of Vine is about more than just the end of an apphttp://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/why-the-death-of-vine-is-about-more-than-just-the-end-of-an-app/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/why-the-death-of-vine-is-about-more-than-just-the-end-of-an-app/#commentsTue, 01 Nov 2016 20:26:08 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=944553People of colour embraced Vine. But when corporate parent Twitter chose bullies over those who made its platform work, they left.

Last week, Twitter announced the end of Vine. If you’re not familiar, Vine was the video equivalent to Twitter’s 140-character microblogging service: users were allotted six seconds to make a statement. While Twitter originally advertised the platform with stop-motion home videos and twee music—think of your best friend’s Pinterest page set to Belle and Sebastian—what emerged was something its creators never envisioned. Amateur comedians, dancers, and video magicians became massively popular on Vine, drawing millions of followers and billions of views. But a massive drop-off in viewership over the past year, coupled with Twitter’s failed attempt at selling itself to the highest bidder, led to Vine’s early demise. While the announcement may come across as a sad end to a popular experiment, it’s actually indicative of two new realities in the digital age: That audiences and content creators of colour are to be ignored at one’s own peril, and that some tech companies will blithely choose peril.

Vine’s widespread appeal came from its radical simplicity and its cultural in-jokes. Fancy, professional production was not only unnecessary, it was to be avoided: some of the most popular Vine creators were teenagers filming at home and around the neighbourhood. Those creators who popularized the six-second sketch, for the most part, were people of colour. In Black households, “do more with less” is less a work ethic than a means of survival, but on Vine, it was a business plan. Creators like Jay Versace, a lanky, round-faced high-schooler, produced hilarious videos lampooning R&B music and shady relatives with little more than improvised wigs and his rubber-faced lip-synching. Dance “challenges” like the “Whip/Nae Nae” and “Betcha Can’t Do It” have exploded on the platform, offering exposure to professional creators who blend talent with goofy wit.

Unlike Twitter, where viral tweets offered hardly more than a few days’ visibility, exposure on Vine had the ability to launch careers. In August 2014, U.S.-based actor Greg Davis Jr. (known on Vine as “Klarity”) posted a video of himself overlooking the canals in Venice, Italy. The loop was set to Jay-Z’s “F–k With Me You Know I Got It,” with late rapper Pimp C’s opening monologue:

“Little over a year ago I was in bondage

And now I’m back out here reaping the blessings

And getting the benefits that go along with it”

In his post, Davis connected the words to his own life—a year prior, he was homeless, had difficulty landing roles and his father had just passed away. But his Vine comedy shorts helped him amass more than two million followers—more than Miley Cyrus—and that following has more than doubled since. Davis joined the ranks of Vine’s top stars and not only found more work, but managed to draw a six-figure salary once his videos caught the attention of corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola and Charmin. Davis kept producing Vine videos until the very end, but most of his peers had long since abandoned the platform for rivals YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. Those services not only offered creators more flexibility, exposure, and revenue-sharing, but also addressed a problem that has plagued Twitter for years: shielding users and creators from online abuse.

Before the trolls temporarily drove Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones away from Twitter, the free speech ethos of its white, male executive team had become something of a running gag. In their eyes, adding features to prevent online bullies from exercising harassment (and even rape and death threats) interfered with their vision of an online ecosystem where all voices were equally heard. And yet, when media giants like the NFL demanded tweets be taken down due to copyright infringement, those tweets disappeared quickly. It was clear whose voices mattered to Twitter’s executive team.

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo famously admitted in 2015, “We suck at dealing with abuse.” Since then, however, the company offered barely more than half-measures (such as its “mute” feature) and occasional account terminations (Such as alt-right apparatchik Milo Yiannopoulos, who orchestrated the abuse directed toward Leslie Jones), which did little to stem the flood. The executive team’s unwillingness to offer more protection, in favour of allowing bullies and actual neo-Nazis free reign to harass everyone from celebrities and journalists to casual users, caused potential buyers Google, Disney, and Salesforce to pass on acquisition bids. In mid-October, Bloomberg reported Disney executives were worried “bullying and other uncivil forms of communication on the social media site might soil the company’s wholesome family image.”

This was a concern that Vine’s most popular creators brought to the company’s attention earlier this year. In a closed-door meeting, 21 Vine creators (who were responsible for billions of annual views) asked for payment in exchange for regular content creation. Additionally, they asked for product changes, namely protection from online harassment. Vine rejected the proposal, and the creators took their work to other platforms. While Vine did eventually produce content filters to reduce harassment, by then it was too late. The talent had left the building, viewership had plummeted, and advertisers had no incentive to help the company monetize. After the failed sale, Twitter axed nine per cent of its global workforce and shut down Vine for good.

It’s sad to see Vine go. There were times when its funny, adorable, and socially incisive videos could make me laugh in spite of otherwise terrible days. At the same time, there’s something revolutionary about the fact that creators of colour were able to walk away intact from all this. Especially from a corporate giant that chose bullies and contradictory principles over the people who made its platform work. After decades of Black and brown entertainers being exploited, held hostage to unconscionable contracts, and left penniless when their 15 minutes ended, it’s a complete reversal that Vine’s talent walked away while the company collapses. While Vine’s management bears a wider responsibility for failing to adapt its product to the way its users actually consume the product, there’s still a point to be made for the wider tech community. Millennials of colour are the ones who create and sustain culture on the Internet. Catering to that market is good business sense. Cross them and, well, your company might just die on the vine too.

NEW YORK — Twitter, seemingly unable to find a buyer and losing money, is cutting about 9 per cent of its employees worldwide.

The social media site has failed to keep pace with rivals Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram and in recent months, rumours that it would be acquired have run rampant.

Shares of Twitter, which have tumbled 27 per cent in the past month as possible suitors have wandered away, rose 4 per cent before the opening bell Thursday.

The San Francisco company said it expects to take $10 million to $20 million in charges as it lays off more than 300 of its 3,860 workers.

“We have a clear plan, and we’re making the necessary changes to ensure Twitter is positioned for long-term growth,” CEO Jack Dorsey said in a company release.

Since the end of 2014, Twitter has lured 15 million monthly users to expand its audience to 313 million people. In that same period, Facebook brought in 319 million users, expanding its reach 1.7 billion people.

Twitter’s service is used heavily by celebrities, journalists and politicians, giving it an outsized role in public discourse. But it has struggled to extend that appeal to a broader audience and has wrestled uncomfortably with bullying on its site and racist posts.

Twitter is placing a big bet on live video, and recently landed a high-profile deal to show National Football League games over 10 Thursdays. It wants to be the go-to place to share opinions in real time.

“But management appears unfocused and complacent, while the narrative has shifted to buyout rumours,” wrote Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter.

On Thursday, Twitter said that average monthly active users climbed 3 per cent to 317 million during its third quarter, while average daily active usage increased 7 per cent.

Twitter Inc. posted a loss of $102.9 million, or 15 cents per share. Adjusted profit of 13 cents per share on revenue of $616 million. Analysts polled by Zacks Investment Research expected earnings of 9 cents per share on revenue of $605.7 million.

Advertising revenue rose 6 per cent to $545 million, with mobile advertising making up 90 per cent of the total ad revenue.

Twitter said that it was not giving revenue forecasts for the fourth quarter or full year due to restructuring in its sales department.

I probably spend too much time on Twitter. Part news feed, part sandbox, part freakishly effective ego stroker, it was seemingly designed for those who crave both simplicity and immediacy—Facebook without the hassles or intrusion. It will be pried from the cold, dead hands of many journalists.

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has amassed some 315 million users thanks to its ability to instantaneously broadcast nibble-sized blasts of invective or praise to one’s followers. These users have an enviable demographic profile. They tend to be younger than Facebook users, better educated and better off than Instagrammers and are nearly three times in number than those of Pinterest. Twitter is for sale, and the buyer would have a ready-made universe populated by millions of Twitter addicts and their data.

Yet no one wants it. Both Google and Disney have balked at Twitter’s $3.5-billion price tag. The most recent tire kicker, California-based cloud computing giant Salesforce, made an offer but ultimately declined to follow through.

It isn’t only because the number of Twitter users has plateaued and even declined as of late, or because Twitter executives have largely failed in connecting eyeballs to advertising. Like many of its users, Twitter has a massive troll problem. As a recent Bloomberg piece about the potential sale to Disney put it, “bullying and other uncivil forms of communications on the social media site might soil [Disney’s] wholesome family image.”

Essentially, anonymous hate-spewers also populate that Twitter universe. This isn’t particularly revelatory to regular Twitter users, yet it seems this toxicity has poisoned the brand. In this sense, the 10-year-old digital media company faces a similar quandary as several legacy media properties: the issue of anonymity.

Ten years ago, web anonymity didn’t much matter for most media sites. In fact, it was quietly encouraged. For a long time, the comment sections of the CBC, Postmedia, The New York Times as well as Huffington Post and many others were akin to the wild west. You could identify yourself before posting a comment, but you didn’t have to.

It was a win-win situation at the time. It coaxed otherwise squeamish readers into the comment sections, bringing out new and previously unheard voices. For publishers, anonymous commenters were as good a commodity as those who put their names to their words.

That’s because commenters, anonymous or not, would click on a story and leave a comment, then return to the site to see if anyone responded. This exercise would repeat itself each time they’d leave another comment. Each visit amounts to a page view, meaning one user could account for multiple clicks.

More clicks meant more ad dollars, and more comments meant more text to feed into the search engine optimization machine. Suddenly stories became more valuable when commenters slagged on one another with abandon. Journalists, this one included, often judged a story’s worth by the number of people teeing off on the writer and one another.

Except the predictable happened. Unburdened by social codes and emboldened by their power to provoke, anonymous commenters abused and tormented at will, often turning comment sections into hateful sideshows.

In 2013, Huffington Post editors put an end to anonymous commenting on the site. A 2014 study analyzed 42 million user comments before and after the ban. Compelling users to identify themselves resulted in “sharply reduced commenting levels and improved user behavior.” (At Macleans.ca, commenters must register before posting.)

Most legitimate Twitter users identify themselves. Yet as a medium that has thrived on selective anonymity, it is all too vulnerable to the same type of abuse. Donald Trump has birthed a cottage industry of articles dedicated to his army of hateful Twitter trolls. One of its more prolific members is often featured in these stories as an example. He regularly incites violence, bemoans Jews, blacks, Mexicans and “white genocide.” And he has more than 13,000 followers. Prolific and relatively popular, this fellow would have been a boon for Twitter 10 years ago. Now he is a liability.

Twitter’s attempts to shut down anonymous trolls have been as slapdash as its advertising initiatives. It has remained hidebound to anonymity in an era of increasing disclosure; instead, it has engaged in a largely complaints-based enforcement strategy and created an oddly secretive “Trust and Safety Council” to foster “greater compassion and empathy on the Internet.”

The solution is staring us all in the face. Twitter should outright ban anonymous users, or at least severely restrict their ability to create such accounts. Sure, it will lose users. But their very presence makes a widely used, thoroughly addictive brand unpalatable.

What is the true nature of humanity? In the absence of society and its restrictions, do we exist in a state of perfect freedom, or absolute chaos? Lengthy philosophical treatises from the likes of Plato, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau have mulled and debated these questions for millennia. While human nature hasn’t changed much, this eternal issue can now be contemplated in 140 characters or less: why do so many people act like complete jerks online?

Earlier this month, Maclean’s came face-to-face with an issue we’ve reported on many times: social media’s apparently endless capacity to fill itself with hatred and venom. Ottawa Associate Editor Shannon Proudfoot, an enthusiastic Twitter user, recently posted about the curious gender sorting of children’s toys. “Boys can be pirates, construction workers, firefighters. Girls can be seven varieties of princess,” she tweeted. It’s an entirely reasonable topic for a journalist to raise. Yet during the next week Proudfoot found herself the recipient of an endless flood of uninvited, often dangerous, invective. Space and good manners preclude us from offering more than a small sample: “You are scum,” “please kill yourself,” “stop abusing your children.” Most of this appeared to come from American anti-feminist groups at the behest of perpetually unhappy right-wing commentators such as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson. Before the deluge subsided, Proudfoot was forced to temporarily block or mute tens of thousands of hostile Twitter users. Following a death threat, police were involved.

Proudfoot’s experience is certainly not unique. Dog-piling—marshalling an army of angry online warriors against individuals who express views at odds with the mob—and other forms of online attacks have become depressingly common occurrences. Black actress Leslie Jones, star of this summer’s Ghostbusters movie, was mercilessly hounded by sexist and racist tweets from “movie fans” upset over her role in the all-female reboot of the 1980s comedy. When the Guardian newspaper in Britain took a close look at 70 million reader comments posted to its website dating back to 2006, it found eight of the top 10 targets for abusive or derogatory messages were female writers. The remaining two were black men. In similar fashion, online feminist mobs have targeted former Republican presidential candidates Rick Perry and Rick Santorum. The underlying issue isn’t the politics of Twitter users, but why online discussions can so quickly become cesspools of hate-filled rhetoric.

Freed from social conventions that govern face-to-face interaction, far too many Twitter users gleefully adopt an overheated mob sensibility on a range of politically charged subjects. Anonymity breeds contempt. As a result, responsible users can find their social media accounts overwhelmed by an interminable stream of hate, making meaningful conversation far too difficult.

The simplest solution is to ask everyone—politely, of course—to ensure their online behaviour aligns with how they act in the real world. Would you shout at a passerby because you disagree with a slogan on their T-shirt? Probably not. So why is it okay to accost complete strangers over Twitter under similar circumstances? Failing widespread adoption of the Golden Rule, users also have the ability to leave Twitter whenever they like. But retreating in the face of bullying leaves the bullies in charge. The same goes for efforts to muster mob attacks in revenge of dog-piles; adding more poison to the well is unlikely to improve water quality. “I like Twitter,” says Proudfoot. “I don’t want to be chased away, but it seems the jerks have all the power.” (She’s stayed on Twitter, and unblocked all the accounts she blocked.)

Twitter and the rest of the privately owned social media universe are free to set their rules however they wish. But if long-term survival is a goal, the overall experience for users must remain positive. More must be done to stem rage-filled attacks while maintaining Twitter’s laudable commitment to free speech and serendipitous communal interaction. A circuit breaker that allows users to pause incoming tidal waves of opprobrium might make sense. Stock markets use similar mechanisms to cool off panicked investors without compromising the integrity of the market. And credit card companies are sophisticated enough to know when your card is being used in ways that are at odds with past patterns. It is in Twitter’s best interests to find new ways to ensure users aren’t deluged by hateful messages from complete strangers. The status quo isn’t working.

Social media has become a big part of many people’s lives. As journalists, we appreciate the ability to communicate with our readers in diverse ways. It is therefore deplorable that bullies and hate-mongers have come to dominate so much of the conversation on Twitter. If social media has become uncivilized, perhaps it’s time for civilization to take it back.

The Twitter logo appears on a phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2015. Twitter is laying off up to 336 employees, signaling CEO Jack Dorsey’s resolve to slash costs while the company struggles to make money. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

TORONTO — Twitter’s vice president for media in North America, Kirstine Stewart, will be leaving the company.

A Twitter spokesman confirmed in an email Thursday that Stewart will part ways with the social media company.

But Cam Gordon said Twitter is “not sharing any other details at this time.”

Stewart joined Twitter Canada three years ago from the CBC, where she was executive vice-president of English services.

Shortly after becoming the company’s Canadian director in April 2013, Stewart announced big partnership deals with Bell Media and Shaw Media.

The frequent Twitter user with more than 71,000 tweets to her name has claimed she was responsible for convincing the always controversial and quotable Don Cherry to sign up for the social network in 2012.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/kirstine-stewart-to-leave-twitter/feed/0Noted on Twitter: What would you do after moving to Canada?http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/noted-on-twitter-what-would-you-do-after-moving-to-canada/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/noted-on-twitter-what-would-you-do-after-moving-to-canada/#respondWed, 22 Jun 2016 15:22:53 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=889981#FirstThingAfterMovingToCanada is trending on Twitter. We picked some of the best answers.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/noted-on-twitter-what-would-you-do-after-moving-to-canada/feed/0Halifax police officer goes viral as #HaliCop meme spreadshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/halifax-police-officer-goes-viral-as-halicop-meme-spreads/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/halifax-police-officer-goes-viral-as-halicop-meme-spreads/#respondSun, 29 May 2016 14:37:20 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=879417Photo of a Const. Shawn Currie sitting on the sidewalk with a busker has captured the hearts and 'likes' of thousands

After hundreds of reposts and shares, the photo has mutated into an online meme under the hashtag #HaliCop.

Photoshopped creations insert a reclining Currie into all manner of fantastical scenarios – taking in The Starry Night by Vincent van Gough, casting a spell in Harry Potter, or being stacked in an all-Currie game of Tetris.

In a meta-take on the #HaliCop phenomenon, 12-year-old Luke Sullivan paid homage to previous viral photo of Currie. In the reimagined photo, Currie writes a fake ticket for himself – taking the place of a three-year-old boy who was “illegally stopped” on his plastic motorcycle last year.

Halifax Regional Police has embraced the community officer’s social media celebrity. The force announced that Currie would pick his favourite creation on Monday, with the winner receiving a travel mug signed by the #HaliCop himself.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/halifax-police-officer-goes-viral-as-halicop-meme-spreads/feed/0Coming soon to Twitter: More room to tweethttp://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/coming-soon-to-twitter-more-room-to-tweet/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/coming-soon-to-twitter-more-room-to-tweet/#respondTue, 24 May 2016 14:25:55 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=876927In coming months, photos, videos and other media won't count against what is now a 140-character limit

In coming months, photos, videos and other media won’t count against what is now a 140-character limit. That means more wordy tweets are on the way.

The change, announced Tuesday, is yet another attempt by the San Francisco company to make its messaging service easier to use and to attract new users.

Twitter Inc. has struggled for years to find a cure for slow user growth. The number of people using Twitter is less than one fifth those actively using its rival, Facebook.

Last year, it launched a channel called “Moments” that brings together hot topics in one place. And earlier this year, it tweaked its timeline to show tweets that users may have missed while they were away.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/coming-soon-to-twitter-more-room-to-tweet/feed/0Police not charging UK man with incitement over tweetshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/police-not-charging-uk-man-with-incitement-over-tweets/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/police-not-charging-uk-man-with-incitement-over-tweets/#respondSat, 26 Mar 2016 12:54:30 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=852561The tweets were in question because British law protects free speech but does not allow incitement of racial hatred

]]>LONDON – British police have dropped charges against a man accused of inciting racial hatred on Twitter after the extremist attacks in Brussels.

Matthew Doyle of south London had been scheduled for a court hearing Saturday because of anti-Muslim tweets. The 46-year-old had been charged on Friday, but a later police statement said Doyle “is no longer charged with the offence and will not be appearing in court.”

The statement hinted that police may have overstepped their authority: “Police may not make charging decisions on offences under Section 19 of the Public Order Act,” it said.

Under British law, cases involving “incitement of racial hatred” have to be reviewed by a team of specialist government lawyers and approved by the attorney general.

The issue is sensitive because British law protects free speech but does not allow incitement of racial hatred. The dividing line can be difficult to draw as stirring up racial “tensions” is permissible but provoking racial “hatred” is not.

Doyle’s tweets the day after the Brussels attacks claimed 31 lives described how he confronted a Muslim woman in south London about the carnage.

When she told him the attacks had nothing to do with her, he criticized her response as “mealy mouthed.” He later used an anti-Muslim slur to describe her.

His tweets drew wide attention and were mocked by many.

The police statement said police will consult the Crown Prosecution Service about the case. It is possible Doyle will be charged at a later date.

British authorities have warned of a potential surge of anti-Muslim crimes as a result of the attacks in Brussels.

The so-called Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the airport and subway bombings and threatened more attacks against European targets.

]]>LONDON — A British man has been charged with using social media to incite racial hatred after posting anti-Muslim tweets in the days after the Brussels attacks.

Matthew Doyle was charged Friday after more than a day of questioning by police. The 47-year-old is scheduled to appear in court Saturday.

He is charged with publishing or distributing written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting and likely or intended to stir up racial hatred

Doyle had tweeted about confronting a Muslim woman in the Croydon area of south London and asking her views on the Brussels attacks. He said she replied that the attacks had nothing to do with her, a response he described as “mealy mouthed.”

He later used an anti-Muslim epithet to describe her.

His tweets drew wide attention, with many mocking him for confronting a Muslim woman in London about the deadly attacks carried out Tuesday by Islamic extremists in Belgium that left 31 dead.

British law protects freedom of speech, but the Crown Prosecution Service says a person can be charged with inciting racial hatred if they say or do something which is “threatening, abusive or insulting and, by doing so, either intends to stir up racial hatred, or makes it likely that racial hatred will be stirred up.”

Prosecutors say stirring up “hatred” is a high legal bar and that the attorney general has to approve every case before charges can be filed.

Doyle quickly deleted both tweets but the images of the postings were captured and retweeted many times.

He was taken in for questioning shortly after the tweets appeared Wednesday.

Police and political leaders have warned of a possible surge in hate crimes against British Muslims in response to the Brussels attack.

The Twitter logo appears on a phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2015. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

NEW YORK — Twitter says that four executives are leaving the company.

Its stock fell almost 4 per cent in morning trading Monday.

CEO Jack Dorsey posted a statement to the microblogging service saying that Alex Roetter, Skip Schipper, Katie Stanton and Kevin Weil are exiting the company. Dorsey said he wanted to address employees later this week, but issued a statement due to ‘inaccurate press rumours’ about the departures.

Was really hoping to talk to Twitter employees about this later this week, but want to set the record straight now: pic.twitter.com/PcpRyTzOlW

Roetter served as senior vice-president of engineering, Schipper was vice-president of human resources, Stanton was vice-president of social media and Weil was senior vice-president of product.

Dorsey said that Chief Operating Officer Adam Bain would be taking on some additional responsibilities on an interim basis. Chief Technology Officer Adam Messinger will also be assuming some responsibilities.

After a long streak of robust growth that turned it into one of the Internet’s hottest companies, Twitter’s growth has slowed dramatically during the past year-and-half to leave the San Francisco-based company scrambling to catch up with social networking leader Facebook and its 1.5 billion users.

Twitter Inc.’s malaise resulted in the departure of Dick Costolo as the company’s CEO last July and ushered in the return of Dorsey, who had been ousted as the company’s leader in 2008.

Dorsey helped invent Twitter in 2006 and imposed a 140-character limit on messages so the service would be easy to use on cellphones that had 160-character limits on texts at that time. Those texting limits on phones faded away several years ago as the advent of smartphones enabled people to use other Internet messaging services. Twitter may be looking to expand beyond its 140 character tweets in a bid to make its service more appealing to wider audience.

Shares of Twitter Inc. dropped 73 cents, or 3.9 per cent, to $17.11 in morning trading. Its shares have fallen more than 56 per cent over the past year.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/top-twitter-executives-leaving-social-media-company/feed/0Man found not guilty in Twitter harassment trialhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/man-found-not-guilty-in-twitter-harassment-trial-2/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/man-found-not-guilty-in-twitter-harassment-trial-2/#commentsFri, 22 Jan 2016 18:03:04 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=825823Observers said it is believed to be the first criminal harassment case in Canada involving Twitter.

]]>TORONTO — A man charged with criminal harassment over his dealings with two Toronto women’s rights activists on Twitter has been found not guilty.

Gregory Alan Elliott was accused of criminally harassing Stephanie Guthrie and Heather Reilly over several months in 2012.

There were rumblings in the courtroom as the Ontario Court Judge Brent Knazan read his decision. Supporters for both sides filled the benches, some even sitting on the floor.

In his tweets, Elliott was largely explaining himself and furthering his views “however offensive or wrong they may be,” the judge said, while recognizing the language could be “vulgar and sometimes obscene.”

The two activists testified at the trial that they believe Elliot kept tabs on them and their whereabouts through social media, even after they blocked his account.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/man-found-not-guilty-in-twitter-harassment-trial-2/feed/1OK, Twitter: What’s the deal? #outagehttp://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/ok-twitter-whats-the-deal-outage/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/ok-twitter-whats-the-deal-outage/#respondTue, 19 Jan 2016 13:21:41 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=823931The company, which has 320 million active users, has tweeted that it is aware of the issue and is trying to fix it

Twitter Inc. was only sporadically available to users on Tuesday, suffering technical problems that have lasted more than four hours.

The company, which has 320 million active users, tweeted that it is aware of the issue and is trying to fix it. The announcement was sent at 3:41 a.m. Eastern Time.

Users said the service was not accessible on desktop computers. Twitter’s blog posts, corporate info and most other pages on the Twitter.com website were also inaccessible, displaying the blue error screen.

Twitter’s mobile app was partially functioning for some users but its timeline updated new tweets sporadically. Its search function appeared disabled as some hashtags or keyword searches returned no results. Users’ profile pages appeared to be accessible from the mobile app.

Third party services, such as the TweetDeck service, also returned a blank page.

Twitter has suffered several service disruptions so far this year. On Monday, some users could not access Twitter on mobile and web for about 10 minutes. The service was disrupted on Friday for about 20 minutes.

Four centuries of posthumous Shakespeare readings. One century of horrifying trench warfare. And two decades since Dolly, the sheep who proved that cloning worked. Here are some of 2016’s biggest anniversaries.

400 years ago…

In March 1616, William Shakespeare wrote his last will and testament, leaving his wife, Anne, his “second best bed.” The next month he died. With three dozen plays—including Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear—to his name, as well as more than 150 sonnets, he is widely proclaimed as the greatest writer in the English language.

Now: Though some doubt that he authored all those works, no one can challenge the brilliance of the creations published under his name. Centuries later, his wording, both invented and adapted, is still commonplace. So while it’s possible for write about a “band of brothers” with “hearts of gold” wanting to “break the ice” with “one fell swoop” in a “brave new world,” perhaps it’s “a foregone conclusion” to remember that, as the Bard wrote, “brevity is the soul of wit.”

100 years ago…

The opening day of the Battle of the Somme during the First World War would bring heartache and sorrow to Newfoundland. At Beaumont-Hamel, France, on the northern end of the Allied front, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment started its advance at 9:15 a.m. on July 1, 1916. Many were cut down before ever reaching enemy territory. Of the 22 officers and 758 others who took part in the advance, all the officers and 658 troops were killed or wounded. The regiment’s divisional commander wrote of their effort: “It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault failed of success because dead men can advance no further.”

Now: The sacrifice at Beaumont-Hamel is seared into the memory of everyone in Newfoundland and Labrador. The land on which so many died was purchased by its colonial government after the First World War and is today a National Historic Site and one of the largest intact battlefields. There, amid the rolling hills, cemeteries and preserved trenches, stands a bronze caribou stag on a crag, facing toward the regiment’s former foe.

85 years ago…

Canada became truly independent on Dec. 11, 1931, with the Statute of Westminster. Following several imperial conferences, in which Dominion politicians, including Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, pressed for greater autonomy from London, the British statute gave Canada (and other dominions such as Australia and New Zealand) the right to pass, amend and repeal its own laws without British interference, while British law no longer applied in Canada. Henceforth, the dominions would be equal to Britain in terms of political stature.

Now: Amendments to Canada’s Constitution were specifically exempted from the statute. That changed in 1982 when Canada formally patriated its Constitution from Britain. Now full constitutional powers rest within the borders of the Queen’s northern realm.

70 years ago…

Jackie Robinson was a brilliant, competitive baseball player—yet his most important achievement was breaking the colour barrier. In 1946 he joined the Montreal Royals, the Triple A farm team for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Familiar with the ever-present racism of the United States, his wife, Rachel, later recalled the “blissful” way in which Montreal treated the couple. On April 15, Jackie Robinson was called up the majors, becoming the first African-American player in the 20th century to take the field. Facing intense hatred with equanimity, the second baseman led Brooklyn to six pennants and its only World Series.

Now: On Robinson’s death in 1972, basketball great Bill Russell told the New York Times, “To most black people, Jackie was a man, not a ballplayer. He did more for baseball than baseball did for him. He was someone young black athletes could look up to.” Every April 15 is Jackie Robinson Day in Major League Baseball, when everyone on every team wears his number, 42.

50 years ago…

Star Trek’s special effects were cheesy, its plots infamous for clunky dialogue and rank sexism. The original series, created by Gene Roddenberry, debuted on Sept. 8, 1966, and featured a debonair Canadian, William Shatner, as Capt. James T. Kirk. He and the crew of the Starship Enterprise were in the midst of a five-year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” The show lasted 79 episodes.

Now: Reborn as a series of movies (12 to date) as well as four spinoff TV shows, Star Trek and its universe of humans, Klingons, Romulans and the Borg are now one of the most enduring franchises in entertainment history. A new film will be out in July, and a new TV series will start in 2017. Resistance truly is futile.

20 years ago…

On the night of July 5, 1996, the most famous lamb in history was born near Edinburgh, Scotland. Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned. Seven months later, scientists at the Roslin Institute showed her off to a world that previously had largely relegated cloning to the realm of science fiction.

Now: Dolly spent her life at the institute, where, bred with a ram, she gave birth to a single lamb, then twins and finally triplets. Suffering from arthritis and a lung ailment, Dolly was euthanized in 2003. She was 6½, half the lifespan of a typical Finn Dorset sheep. While at least 20 other animals have since been cloned, including cats and pigs, the ethical argument over the procedure endures.

10 years ago…

Jack Dorsey made history on March 21, 2006, when he published the following message: “Just setting up my twttr.” He was the co-creater of Twitter. Defined as “a short burst of inconsequential information,” the name, and its 140-character limit, would soon become famous.

Now: From around 400,000 tweets a quarter in 2007, it now generates that same number every minute. A lifeline of real-time information during disasters and political upheavals, it has 320 million monthly active users—yet still hasn’t made an annual profit.

Norm Kelly doesn’t have the kind of celebrity star power that usually comes with 212,000 Twitter followers. Instead, the Toronto city councilor skyrocketed to social media stardom when he called out Meek Mill, a Philadelphia rapper, who was trying to start a feud with Toronto legend, Drake.

“You’re no longer welcome in Toronto, @MeekMill,” @norm wrote in July, garnering more than 130,000 retweets, the fifth-most retweeted post in Canada this year. (Alas, he couldn’t come close to the top spot, which belonged to Justin Bieber posing in Calvin Klein underwear for his 71 million followers.)

In an (almost) end-of-year recap, Twitter Canada looked back at some the best of 2015, from the historic provincial win in Alberta for the NDP to the international sporting events Canada hosted over the summer—namely, the Women’s World Cup of soccer and the Pan Am Games.

Sport and politics clearly mixed well on Twitter, as four of the country’s top five hashtags this year either related to politics (#cdnpoli and #elxn42) or Toronto Blue Jays baseball (#BlueJays and #comeTOgether), according to Twitter Canada.

Naturally, it makes sense that on Oct. 19—the day the Liberals won a majority government and the Blue Jays won a playoff game—Canadians sent more than 5.5 million Tweets, the highest daily volume of the year.

The Jays, meanwhile, vaulted into top spot among the most followed Canadian sports teams on Twitter in 2015, ahead of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens (who now rank second and third in that category, respectively).

As for Kelly: Despite his meteoric rise, he still isn’t among the five most followed politicians in the country. That list features, in order: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, former prime minister Stephen Harper, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, and Green Party leader Elizabeth May.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/the-rise-of-norm-canadas-top-tweets-of-2015/feed/0Down with likeability! The problem with our ‘like’ culturehttp://www.macleans.ca/society/life/down-with-likeability-the-problem-with-our-like-culture/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/down-with-likeability-the-problem-with-our-like-culture/#commentsFri, 13 Nov 2015 15:58:08 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=792383Hearts and smiley faces have become our highest cultural currency. Welcome to a world where meritocracy is replaced by friendocracy

In past weeks, Hillary Clinton’s “I’m fun! I’m accessible! Vote for me!” tour saw her bonding with her comedic doppelgänger, Kate McKinnon, on Saturday Night Live, and confessing to Stephen Colbert that she and Bill binge-watched House of Cards. The charm initiative is aimed at detonating decades-old criticism that Clinton is “unlikeable”—aggressive, wooden, humourless. Past counteroffensives, which included baking cookies and dancing on Ellen, came off as phony, itself an unlikeable quality. Behind-the-scenes worry over Clinton’s perceived unlikeability is so high, Edward Klein alleges in his new book, Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary Clinton, that Steven Spielberg was enlisted to make her cuddlier—“more Golda [Meir] than Maggie [Thatcher].” Clinton balked, Klein writes, saying, “I’m not going to pretend to be somebody I’m not”—a likeable response. She quit the coaching soon after.

That Klein, a Republican known to attack the Clintons, zeroed in on “unlikeabilty” is predictable in a country where future presidents are judged by citizens’ desire to drink a beer with them. But it reflects a larger and more odious trend: likeability’s rise as a paramount value, one that trumps intelligence, character, competence, integrity, originality, even talent.

It should be no surprise that Twitter recently changed its “favourite” button from a neutral star to an emotive heart; it’s a sign of the times that a tweet about genocide can now be “hearted.” Who needs Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Effective People? These days we have the “13 habits of exceptionally likeable people”—a recent Forbes article—and bestsellers like Dave Kerpen’s Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (& Other Social Networks). Facebook “likes” and Instagram “hearts” are entrenched as metrics, valued measures of success for cultural products —vital for authors, musicians, artists.

The unofficial queen of this new world order: Taylor Swift, she of 65.9 million Twitter followers and 54.5 million on Instagram. Swift is talented; she writes catchy songs. But her superstardom (and estimated $250 million net worth) clearly derives from her extreme likeability: she dances gooﬁly at awards shows and engages non-stop with fans on social media—commenting, caring, preventing bullying, sharing pics of her cats, freshly baked cookies and slumber parties with celebrity BFFs including Lena Dunham, Karlie Kloss and Jennifer Lawrence.

Paul Sakuma/AP Photo

To even question such affirmation and connectivity—a world in which Maya Angelou’s mantra, “People will forget what you said and what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel,” is stamped on coffee mugs—seems churlish, even unlikeable. But there’s a lot not to like about a culture based on the most milquetoast of emotions, a creepy Brave New World-meets-high-school world where meritocracy is replaced by friendocracy, thought by feeling, and where conformity reigns. Politicians focus on relatability, not policy; and hearts, smiley faces, and other staples of the middle-school doodler are symbols of the highest cultural currency.

Likeability has always been important, of course, and tied to success. But the current focus on “like” is more mercantile than social, the culmination of a trend that began with Dale Carnegie and led to “Q scores” of the ’60s, but with a key difference. Their target audiences were CEOs, entrepreneurs and celebrities; today, social media subjects the non-famous masses to similar scrutiny. That hardly seems shocking in a world where “likes,” “views” and “followers” are economic drivers as well as self-worth measures: Facebook “likes,” we know, provide marketers with a gold mine of intimate information—from political views to shopping habits.

But the effects of a likeability fixation are more sweeping than we realize. People like, and buy, the familiar. So a world driven by “like” doesn’t stray too far from comfort zones. Confrontation and dissent and iconoclasm don’t belong—nor does the spirit of invention that can accompany them. This is not a place for Stravinskys or Philip Larkins; it’s certainly not one for Frida Kahlo, who would be trolled for her “resting bitch face.” Would Glenn Gould, a reclusive eccentric who made odd faces over his piano, prevail as a major musical talent in 2015? Unlikely. He’d have, like, zero “likes”!

The likeability obsession is particularly constraining for women. Sociologist Marianne Cooper, a Stanford professor and lead researcher for Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, published an article in the Harvard Business Review in 2013, in which she cited a stream of studies that showed high-achieving women were seen as unlikeable because their behaviour violates gender stereotypes: “Women are expected to be nice, warm, friendly, and nurturing,” she said, listing the Taylor Swift playbook. Those who act assertively, competitively, or exhibit decisive leadership, are “deviating from the social script,” she writes. “We are deeply uncomfortable with powerful women . . . We often don’t really like them.”

Sheryl Sandberg. (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg )

Even fictional women are under pressure to be likeable, a point made when novelist Claire Messud sparked a firestorm after a 2013 interview in which she defended Nora Eldridge, her unlikeable protagonist in The Woman Upstairs. Nora filled a void in fiction, Messud said: “Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman.” When the interviewer said she “wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora,” Messud rhymed off a list of unlikeable male characters, from Humbert Humbert to Hamlet, adding: “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.” Novelist Meg Wolitzer dubbed the trend toward likeable characters “slumber party fiction.” Last week, the Guardian quoted Jenny Diski deriding the “mediocrity of fiction” as “really to do with feeling cosy, and that you’ve got a nice friend sitting in your lap telling you a nice story.”

Likeability is crucial for both female and male politicians, Edward Klein tells Maclean’s. It’s the reason our last prime minister spent years posing in sweaters, and why Tom Mulcair’s team tamped down his “anger” during the federal campaign, with the unfortunate result of his appearing constantly overmedicated.

Still, we’ve bought into the likeability mandate to the extent that it’s even shaping cosmetic surgery trends and how we look. In a study published in the April 2015 JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, plastic surgeon Michael Reilly, an assistant professor at Georgetown University school of medicine, examined how women were judged pre- and post-cosmetic procedures. He found the biggest perceived improvements were in social skills, attractiveness, femininity and likeability. “Likeability is a complex subject that extends beyond a two-dimensional image of a face,” Reilly told Maclean’s. But a “likeable” face is more content, less angry and more receptive, he says: “Personality traits are drawn from an individual’s neutral expressions; it’s animal instinct to avoid those who seem ill-willed.” Perhaps, but we are also increasingly likely to interpret neutral, unsmiling expressions as ill will. Aging, for instance, reverses positive expressions like smiling. As Reilly explains it, “As people’s faces fall, the effect is essentially a frown, a tiredness.” In the past, an older face might have been read as serious or wise. Reilly perfectly articulates the modern response: “People don’t think you’re interested in what they’re saying.” And we like people who make us feel good. “We want to be affirmed and feel people agree with us,” author Dave Kerpen, CEO of New York City consultancy Likeable Media, tells Maclean’s.

The unsmiling face wasn’t always so unfashionable—historical photos and paintings are full of people with dour expressions. But it doesn’t fit the huggy mood of our times. “Resting bitch face” went viral for a reason in our time, says Reilly. “Patients, men and women, say: ‘This has been a challenge my whole life; people judge me.’ ” He prefers “resting angry face.” Either way, it’s something to fix: “If someone has a facial resting position that is a bit happier—more fullness in the cheeks, more upturn to the corners of the mouth as opposed to a resting frown—it makes a huge difference,” Reilly says.

We are now entering a phase of “like” inflation. Simply “liking” is so common (and banal) that Tinder has introduced a “super like” button. There are also signs of a brewing backlash. One of Hollywood’s best-liked (and bankable) actors, Jennifer Lawrence, recently admitted she didn’t negotiate her contract for American Hustle as fiercely as she should have, because she wanted to be liked: “I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled,’ ” the 25-year-old Lawrence wrote in Lena Dunham’s newsletter Lenny. Her attitude changed after the Sony hack revealed big salary discrepancies between female and male actors in the film: “I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likeable!” she wrote. “F–k that.” The fitting ending: Lawrence’s defiance was met with universal Twitter “favourites” and Facebook “likes.”

It didn’t require much reading of the tea leaves for Bart Teeuwisse to figure out he was losing his job at Twitter. News reports began circulating one day in mid-October that the social media giant was laying off eight per cent of its global staff. That morning, Teeuwisse couldn’t log into his company email. That’s how he learned of his dismissal and, naturally, he tweeted it: a picture of the “access denied” message and a news-feed notification about the company layoffs. It was retweeted 4,200 times.

It’s an old office joke horrifically come to life: Your access card isn’t just malfunctioning; it is, in fact, hinting that you’re about to be let go. As companies search for ways to streamline processes, and do so within increasingly interconnected systems—from HR to IT to communications—it’s more commonplace for employers to miss one important detail in a layoff: letting the affected employee know first.

When Cenovus Energy underwent mass layoffs last month in Calgary, several people showed up to work, only to find they were unable to access certain applications within Cenovus’s internal computer system. They received the news formally soon after.

Cutting computer access early protects the company from things such as internal documents getting leaked to a competitor. If only it didn’t appear so heartless, like breaking up with a boyfirend via text. Cenovus spent the rest of the day apologizing on Twitter for their blunder, and later issued a statement on Facebook, concluding with: “We wanted to make this difficult process as dignified and respectful as possible, and we’re sorry if this mistake caused additional stress for our staff on an already difficult day.”

“If your employees were trustworthy up until today,” says Cissy Pau, a principal consultant with Vancouver-based Clear HR Consulting, “why would you treat them like criminals when you let them go?” Pau remembers working years ago with a company going through a major downsizing. She had to help plan for each employee being let go: at what time, in what room, and where they could meet out-placement councillors. Windows were blocked off so no one could see inside. The IT department also had a list to streamline the process from the technical end. “It was like we brought in the SWAT team that day,” she says.

But in today’s more ﬂexible workplace environment, that’s getting complicated for mass layoffs, especially with fewer human hands on deck. Research from Oxford University and Deloitte pegs a 90 per cent chance that human resources administrative positions will be automated within the next 20 years. And even an HR SWAT team would have trouble getting a hold of telecommuters and those working off-peak hours at the same time. Twitter tried to reach Teeuwisse to tell him the unfortunate news over the phone. Alas, that message went to his voicemail—“a side effect of WFH [working from home],” Teeuwisse tweeted. “HR can’t wait for you to come in.”

The companies don’t mean any harm, but “it’s operationally dysfunctional,” says Nita Chhinzer, a professor at the University of Guelph who specializes in downsizing practices. “It’s a matter of balancing the sheer scale of these exits.” It’s also a double-edged sword for managers, Chhinzer adds: If companies revoke access too early, it’s a problem. If they don’t do it early enough, that, too, can be a PR disaster—as seen by HMV’s social media blunder. During a round of cuts in 2013, one young employee with access to the company Twitter account live-tweeted the layoffs. “There are over 60 of us being fired at once! Mass execution of loyal employees who love the brand #hmvXFactorFiring,” the ofﬁcial @hmvtweets account said. That tweet was followed soon after by: “Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask ‘How do I shut down Twitter?’ ” HMV was a social media laughingstock before they could get their account back.

Even on a smaller scale, things can go awry. When the coach of a Bosnian professional soccer team visited his team’s Facebook page after a loss in late September, news of him being fired was at the top of the feed. Whether it was a snub from ownership or simply the team’s social media hire getting the word out too early, the fired coach was quick to comment in the Facebook thread, writing: “THANKS FOR LETTING ME KNOW.

“We spend a lot of time talking about attraction and retention of staff,” Pau says. “Our message to clients is how you treat employees in bad times is a truer sign of that company’s character than how you treat them in good times.”

]]>The agonizing ups and downs of the American League Championship Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Kansas City Royals has got fans on both sides engaging in some pretty wild trash talk. Yet amid all the inside baseball jokes and brags has emerged a witty war of words between the two cities’ public library systems. Combing through catalogues and shelves, librarians in Kansas City, Mo., and Toronto have created #BookSpinePoetry.

The latest exchange came on Wednesday. It was a do-or-die match, as Kansas City had a commanding 3-1 lead in the series, including the previous night’s blow-out 14-2 win. So it was the Missouri-based system that rubbed a bit of literary salt in Toronto’s wounds just before game 5.

The Toronto library system had prepared two versions of the tweet—one for a win, the other for a loss—and then just waited, and waited. A few minutes after the Blue Jays’ victory, the library sent out its winning version, reminding Missouri that the series isn’t over. Befitting this librarians’ civilized tone, Kansas City quickly replied with a one-word answer.

This isn’t the only challenge currently under way between the two library systems. Before the tweets started flying, Kansas City Public Library executive director Crosby Kemper sent an email wager to his Toronto counterpart, city librarian Vickery Bowles. Kansas City put up beer and barbeque while Toronto bet peameal bacon and butter tarts. Bowles thought of poutine, but didn’t think it would ship well. While this war of books has captured the attention of social media, it’s not the first time both library systems have taken to Twitter to boost the spirits of their cities, and cheer on their teams, not only in this series, but in the previous one as well.

Bowles also notes that some of the objects in its tweets are from a historic collection of Blue Jays memorabilia that was donated earlier this year by an avid fan. Among the thousands of objects are souvenir brochures, schedules, buttons, tickets and programs. The collection starts in 1977, when the Blue Jays started in the American League East, and goes up to 1994, just after the team won back-to-back World Series.

As for this Twitter war with Kansas City, Bowles, is delighted that it’s caught the imagination of social media and is drawing more people into exploring the library’s print as well as electronic collections. “We couldn’t do this with ebooks,” she notes.

Like the baseball series, there will be at least one more round in this genteel trash-talking contest. Hopefully two.

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter is embracing Jack Dorsey as its CEO in hopes that its once-spurned co-founder can hatch a plan to expand the short messaging service’s audience and end nearly a decade of financial losses.

The hiring revealed Monday in a regulatory filing ends Twitter’s three-month search for a new leader. It marks Dorsey’s second stint as CEO since he helped start the San Francisco company more than nine years ago with Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass.

Twitter dumped Dorsey his first time around, but its board of directors now appears convinced he has the maturity to fix the problems that has caused the company’s stock to lose nearly half its value in the past five months.

Dorsey, 38, has already had dress rehearsal for the job, having become Twitter’s interim CEO in July after former stand-up comedian and veteran entrepreneur Dick Costolo stepped down amid shareholder discontent.

Twitter is believed to have considered its chief revenue officer, Adam Bain, and several other CEO candidates before settling on Dorsey.

Dorsey will no longer be Twitter’s chairman, but he will continue as CEO of Square Inc., a company he co-founded in 2009, as he prepares that for its initial public offering of stock.

The short messaging service has amassed more than 300 million users, but its growth has been slowing to the frustration of investors even as people spend more time online, particularly on their smartphones.

Facebook has hooked 1.5 billion people on its online social network and even its photo-sharing application, Instagram, has surpassed Twitter in size. Unlike Twitter, Facebook has been making money for years and its stock has more than doubled from its IPO price. In contrast, Twitter’s stock is barely above its IPO price of $26 nearly two years after its market debut.

Dorsey should be highly motivated, given he owns a 3 per cent stake in Twitter currently worth about $600 million.

Dorsey might attempt to draw more traffic to Twitter and engage more people by lifting the 140-character limit that he originally imposed on tweets so they would fit under the restrictions imposed at that time on phone texting. Since Dorsey became interim CEO, Twitter already has already tossed out the 140-character limit private messages sent through Twitter.

Increasing the length of tweets, though, might alienate some of Twitter’s most loyal and active users, who have embraced the 140-character limit as an exercise in eloquence.

Dorsey has must ensure that Twitter’s steadily rising revenue begins to produce profits relatively soon. Although the company generated $938 million in revenue during the first half of this year, Twitter still lost $299 million. That raised Twitter’s total losses since its inception to $1.9 billion.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/twitter-names-jack-dorsey-its-chief-executive/feed/0How did that candidate get the green light?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/how-did-that-candidate-get-the-green-light/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/how-did-that-candidate-get-the-green-light/#respondSun, 20 Sep 2015 01:17:23 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=757187Charles Bird, who used to vet candidates for the Liberal Party, on background searches, how mistakes happen, and ‘crushing dreams’

Liberal candidate Chris Austin was dropped on Wednesday after comments he made on Facebook came to light that were, as the party said in a statement, “irreconcilable with the values of the Liberal Party of Canada.” He’s not the only Liberal hopeful to fall from grace. Joy Davies quit as a candidate in B.C. due to her pro-marijuana comments on Facebook, while Ala Buzreba was running in Alberta until she resigned when offensive Twitter messages surfaced. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have also dropped candidates: Jerry Bance was caught peeing in a customer’s mug while working as an appliance repairman; Tim Dutaud made fun of disabled people in crank calls posted to YouTube, and a blogger exposed Blair Dale’s inappropriate comments on social media. The NDP, too, dropped candidate Morgan Wheeldon for comments he made on Israel.

To find out about what goes on behind the scenes with the parties’ “green-light committees,” Maclean’s chatted with Charles Bird, now a principal with the public-affairs consulting firm Earnscliffe Strategy Group, who did vetting for the Liberal Party under Paul Martin in 2006.

Q:There’s been no shortage of candidates getting caught up in scandals in recent weeks: Peegate, the crank phone-caller posing as a disabled person, the Liberal candidate in Calgary who tweeted at someone four years ago to “go blow your brains out you waste of sperm.” How do these people get past the vetting process?

A: The reality of the situation is there are 338 ridings, which means any given party hopes to nominate 338 candidates. Some will be incumbents and presumably will have been checked thoroughly before, but in a lot of cases riding nomination campaigns will involve three, four, sometimes more candidates, and the reality is that it’s very difficult to do a deep dive on every one of them.

Most parties these days have what are known as “green-light committees” which are responsible for determining whether a potential candidate should stand for nomination. There’s a preliminary assessment done, which essentially looks at a number of fundamental questions, but whether they have the time to go into the personal history of what potential candidates have done or said over the years is an open question.

You would hope these days, given the explosion of social media, that parties would have the good sense to at least have a thorough review of a potential candidate’s social media history. That becomes more problematic with things like YouTube and videos where the given individual may have not been tagged using his or her real name.

It is very difficult to do the kind of thorough review that we would hope our candidates are subjected to. Now, candidate-vetting has become much more centralized and intends to be done on a regional or provincial basis, rather than riding-by-riding.

Q:When you’re digging into a person’s history, is it simply Google searches of the person?

A: The first part with vetting candidates usually starts with the positives: What have potential candidates done in the community that strengthens their connection to the riding? This is usually the best indication of whether a candidate has the wherewithal to represent the party. The negatives tend to be more difficult to discern. Police and credit checks are standard, but it’s generally what a candidate has said and done in the past that can come back to haunt a campaign. Google can only take [you so] far.

You really need an intensive interview process with potential candidates to get a better understanding of their personal histories on a range of issues. You also need to ensure their resumé is accurate and not been subject to enhancement or outright falsification. This is so essential because opposing campaigns will be doing very thorough reviews of what an opposition candidate has said or done with an eye to embarrassing or discrediting both the candidate and the party.
Getting potential candidates to come clean with what they have said or done in the past can be a challenge. Some candidates won’t necessarily recognize their past can come back to haunt them, while others will deliberately hide what might prove troublesome. The folks who are more fixated on getting the nomination are more inclined to skim past the more embarrassing elements of their past.

Q:Is it difficult to get people to admit to those past indiscretions?

A: There are a number of techniques you can use. When you sit down with a potential candidate, you go in armed through your preliminary check with some of things they’ve said or done that could prove to be potentially damaging and say, “This is the time when you really need to come clean with me with what else might be out there because whether you realize it or not, there are things our opponents may seize upon in your personal past in terms of what you’ve said, done or written that could really prove detrimental not only to your campaign in the riding but also the party as a whole.”

Likewise, it always helps to talk to people who know the candidate in question. These can be character references, but probably the more useful checks are with folks who may not necessarily like the potential candidate. They may say they’re this, that or the other, but as long as they’re not pointing to stuff that could be detrimental, you can proceed with a relative degree of safety.

Q:So if someone says they’d like to run in a riding, you would say to him or her: “Tell me some people who generally don’t like you?”

A: Yeah. You could do that. Absolutely. You can challenge a potential candidate a number of different ways. It’s a good way of seeing whether they’re able to withstand the pressures. Part of it is an education process for the candidate.

Q:How many people are part these green-light committees?

A: It varies. Generally, it’s half a dozen or so. These are the individuals who will be responsible for reviewing resumés and, in a lot of cases, doing sit-down interviews with potential candidates to see whether they pass muster, whether their connections to the riding are sufficient, whether they exhibit sufficient political gravitas in order to run.

The green-light committees have to exercise some degree of judgement. It can be an enormously subjective process and it can also be a process where, if you’re not careful, it can be prone to manipulation. That’s to say, if certain individuals have a preferred outcome in terms of a potential candidate for a giving riding, lo and behold, every other candidate fails to past muster.

One thing that is best avoided for the sake of our democracy is a situation where a perfectly upstanding person comes forward and has every reason to seek a nomination for a given party and a bunch of acquainted hacks basically say, “No thanks. We’re not even going to let you seek the nomination.” That’s when things start to get dangerous.

Q:So you don’t hire a private investigator to look into your own people?

A: No. But I will say that practice is becoming a lot more prevalent in the United States. It’s one thing to have university students in a room Googling the daylights out of an opposition candidate. It’s quite another to have somebody who is a skilled investigator do that kind of work. I think one of the reasons it hasn’t happened in Canada is two-fold. One—it’s very expensive. And two—the privacy laws in Canada are more stringent.

Q:The former Conservative candidate in Papineau [Chris Lloyd], he was running as part of an art project. It came out later that in 2011, he even sent the Conservative Party of Canada a fake cheque for $30 billion—and in the memo it said the money was for the “F-35 Fighter Jets.” He was running in Papineau, which is Justin Trudeau’s riding—would that person not get vetted as hard because he likely wouldn’t win?

A: You would absolutely want to pay close attention to who you have [running] against a national party leader because they will receive disproportionate attention if they say or do anything that could be considered foolish. Even if they don’t have a hope in hell of winning the riding, they will be subject to more media scrutiny.

Q: And what about those who get caught up saying stuff on Twitter?

A: Social media is the purview of trolls who say deliberately incendiary things. Very often, decent individuals will react suddenly—especially if they are personally offended—and will do so out of a sense of frustration and anger. And that can often sit there for years, as was the case with Shawn Dearn, Tom Mulcair’s director of communications, who in response to an edict from the former Pope Benedict XVI, pushed his views as to where the Pope could go in no uncertain terms. This was five years ago but this news just broke. You now have a situation where a casual reader might see the NDP’s director of communication said the Pope—and by extension all Catholics—can go you-know-what. If there was ever a crystal-clear message of the dangers of reacting out of anger or frustration on social media, that would be it. It’s interesting that it’s what we would call the “bozo eruptions” on the part of the governing Conservatives that tend to get more of the attention than what you’re seeing of the opposition parties. That may go with the territory of being the governing party.

Q:The folks who get busted for things they said on Twitter—it’s so easy to check. How do vetters not catch these things?

A: I would agree. It is ridiculously easy to check. It doesn’t take that much to go through your sent tweets and to erase anything you find objectionable. That said, you never know who out there has a freeze-frame of what you said. Snapchat notwithstanding, anything you send into the world of social media has a degree of permanence. Even if you’re erasing stuff from your Facebook page, or your changing your resumé on LinkedIn because you exaggerated a bit, there’s a real possibility someone out there already has it—but the people doing the vetting likely won’t be those people. Arguably the most important part of the vetting process is the one-on-one interview with the candidate. That’s something I put a lot of stock in.

Q:Did you enjoy vetting when you were doing it?

A: No. It’s a very gruelling process. I had to sit down in some very difficult situations with individuals to tell them, “I’m sorry. I’m required to shatter your dreams of being an elected official”—that’s no fun whatsoever.

Q:When you were ‘crushing dreams’—can you give an example?

A: Without mentioning any names, there were people who had previous convictions of great concern that could have been used against them.

Q:A criminal conviction is likely a deal-breaker, but for social comments—I’m thinking about the Liberal candidate in Calgary who tweeted, “Go blow your brains out you waste of sperm”—where’s the line between “We can get past this” and “This is a deal breaker?”

A: You know it when you see it. There can be some allowances made for the context for a given comment in the midst of a heated argument. If you say something that is truly offensive, you need to recognize it right away and apologize immediately because it speaks to your maturity as an individual. It is a grey line. Generally, anything that is offensive to a group of people is a showstopper, especially if you see repeated instances of it.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May arrives at a campaign event where she released the party’s platform in Vancouver, B.C., on Wednesday September 9, 2015. A federal election will be held October 19. (DARRYL DYCK/CP)

OTTAWA — There were three podiums on the stage for Thursday’s federal leaders’ debate on the economy, but it was the one Elizabeth May set up on Twitter that captured most of the social media attention.

The Green party leader used Twitter videos to rebut various talking points throughout the debate — and data provided by the social networking site suggested her talking points got the most people talking.

May’s videos on trade, jobs and carbon pricing were the most retweeted messages at the halfway mark of a debate that also touched on immigration, housing, infrastructure and general economic vision.

Whether the debate changed any minds remains to be seen, but it generated more online interest in May overall — Twitter says she earned 5,000 new followers.

While May drove Twitter traffic, Google said the most Googled debater was Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, narrowly edging out Conservative rival Stephen Harper.

Debate-watchers were also tweeting for fun Thursday: more than 1,000 tweets mentioned the intrusive bell that was used to signal the end of a session.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/elizabeth-may-on-globedebate-sorry-mr-harper-fact-check/feed/5How to gaffe-proof your Twitter accounthttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/politweet/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/politweet/#respondWed, 16 Sep 2015 21:08:50 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=756081The Maclean's PoliTweet tool is just what candidates and their staffers need. Try it today to see if that tweet will get you into trouble!

This election campaign has established a new Andy Warhol-style maxim: In the future, everyone will be a political candidate for 15 minutes—until a reporter goes through his or her Twitter feed and uncovers disturbing views on race, homosexuality or the third season of Gilmore Girls.

Social media gaffes have hit all the major parties, who apparently still let people run for office without first checking to see if their Facebook status update is: “Hanging out on the deck, being religiously intolerant.”

Understand: The real victims here are luckless war-room staffers tasked with trudging through social media accounts on a quest for offensive remarks. Only God knows how many photographed entrees and vacation selfies they’ve had to endure.

But it’s a problem for the parties, too. Happily, there is now a solution. Earlier this year, Twitter introduced a “Ready to tweet?” option for its TweetDeck app. It’s an additional box that needs to be ticked to confirm you really want to pull the trigger on that scorching “My flight is slightly delayed” hot take.

As a gaffe-prevention tool, the “Ready to tweet?” option is a step in the right direction. But it’s not enough to protect political candidates and their staffers.

Which is why I invented PoliTweet.

Are you an aspiring MP with something to share on Twitter? Simply type your message of 140 characters or fewer, then navigate PoliTweet’s 15-step confirmation process. It’s the only tweeting platform designed to ensure you never publish anything that can later be used by political rivals to make you look like a dumbass.

Type your tweet below. We’ve also written an innocuous one for you, as a default!

Now, when you’re ready, follow the checklist below, and see if you’re good to go:

No references to someone being worse than Hitler, or Hitler having been misunderstood, or Hitler being the name of your dog? No photo attached of you dressed up for Halloween as Hitler, or Hitler’s moustache, or Blackface Nazi Jesus bin Laden?

You’re aware that there’s a difference between publishing a tweet and whispering something to a friend, or even shouting it aloud in the produce section of a grocery store?

Attuned to the reality that a private tweet will never stay private, a deleted tweet will never truly be gone, and even an innocuous reference to William Shatner will make him call you out online for your “tripe?”

Cognizant of the fact that, should this tweet ultimately prove offensive, no one on the face of this Earth will believe your contention that you were hacked? (Hacking claims are the “I have no idea how this steroid got in my body” of the 2010s.)

Accepting of the fact that the passage of time will also fail to pass muster as a valid defence? (Sure, I used Twitter to tell the Pope to go stick it, but that was two whole weeks ago . . .)

Ready to overlook the hard truth that even the people who follow you don’t really care how many stars you give the new Madden?

So, seriously now, really think about it . . .

Ready to tweet?

Sure you ticked the above box because you’re actually ready to tweet, and not because you’re just used to ticking boxes online without reading the details of what you’re agreeing to, which is why the maker of iTunes now holds power of attorney over your financial affairs?

One hundred per cent certain nothing in this tweet will come back to haunt you?

Absolutely confident that what you’ve got to share with the world won’t graphically implode your career aspirations?

OK, then . . . Are you ready to tweet?

Finished? Now click the image below to see if PoliTweet approves.

Sorry! Your tweet was not approved by PoliTweet. Thank you for using PoliTweet.

EDMONTON — The Liberals have dropped an Alberta candidate after some previous comments came to light.

Chris Austin had been selected as the candidate for Sturgeon River-Parkland, but the Liberals said Wednesday that new information brought to their attention led them to drop him.

“Some of Chris Austin’s views, as articulated in past comments, are irreconcilable with the values of the Liberal Party of Canada,” the party said in a statement.

The Liberals did not elaborate on those past comments. But a Twitter account bearing the same name posted a link to a video of last year’s Parliament Hill shooting, writing, “Harper has turned our Nation’s Capital into a War Zone as his thirst for War.”

The account also posted a link to a news article about little-known spy agency Communications Security Establishment Canada and wrote, “The Gestapo Of Canada lol :)”

The same day a post linked to a story about the CBC firing Jian Ghomeshi with the comment, “Will Canada Become A Fascists Dictatorship?”

The Liberals’ new candidate for Sturgeon River-Parkland, Travis Dueck, is expected to be acclaimed at a nomination meeting Thursday.

Past comments have also felled two other Liberal candidates during this campaign.

Liberal Joy Davies quit as a candidate in the B.C. riding of South Surrey-White Rock, over pro-marijuana comments on Facebook. Ala Buzreba, a Liberal running in Alberta, resigned over offensive Twitter messages.

On Tuesday the Conservatives dismissed their sixth candidate since the start of the election campaign. Blair Dale, a candidate in Newfoundland, was removed because of comments posted on Facebook that were “incompatible” with the party, a spokesman said.

Morgan Wheeldon resigned as NDP candidate in the Nova Scotia riding of Kings-Hants after controversial comments he allegedly made on Facebook about the Middle East.

The recent spate of social media gaffes offering sideshows on the election trail highlights both the need for and dangers of scrutinizing the online personas of would-be politicians, say experts.

Video footage, tweets and Facebook status updates posted to the web long before the campaign kicked off have caused headaches among all political parties and forced candidates of all stripes to abandon their bids for elected office.

The content of the archived posts ranged from the sophomoric to the offensive, causing observers to wonder how party officials could have failed to spot the red flags while assessing each candidate’s online history.

Experts say that’s because social media has still not become a vetting priority for Canada’s political parties.

“It’s fairly obvious that all concerned are not giving enough weight to social media vetting before approving anyone’s candidacy,” social media analyst Carmi Levy said in a telephone interview. “They’re not doing basic due diligence, and it’s coming back to bite them.”

Candidates wanting to run under any of Canada’s three major political parties are far from given a free ride.

General “green light” guidelines on the Liberal party website warn applicants to expect background checks, questions about their political affiliations, and probes into their personal finances. The party also requires an application fee of $1,000.

The Conservative party declined to comment on what goes into their vetting practices beyond a party spokesman’s emailed comment that said: “We have the highest standards for our candidates.”

The NDP did not respond to requests for comment.

Observers, however, say that the guidelines touched on by the Liberals understate the scope of the scrutiny that nominees for all parties must go through.

Aspiring politicians must complete rigorous and often intrusive questionnaires probing areas such as past bankruptcies, previous divorces, criminal history and old political affiliations.

Copies of those questionnaires, published in part last year by the National Post, offer striking examples.

The Conservative party asked would-be candidates if they had ever supported or agreed with groups promoting any region’s secession from Canada. The Liberals asked whether potential nominees had current matrimonial or child custody battles on their hands.

The NDP’s sample questionnaire asked applicants to disclose all blogs and social media platforms on which they maintain a presence, but exploring those myriad networks is a task that many believe is beyond the scope of Canada’s current system.

“This process is often conducted by volunteers. We don’t have the money in Canadian politics or media to do exhaustive opposition research or vetting,” said crisis management consultant Allan Bonner.

Levy said it’s next to impossible to track down the average person’s complete online profile, since activity is usually spread over multiple platforms over many years.

Recent examples of political gaffes show that controversial content can be found under nearly any online stone.

YouTube footage of former Conservative candidate Tim Dutaud making crank calls in which he pretended to be mentally disabled might not have been hard to find, but one would have had to look harder to track down the four-year-old tweets that cost Ala Buzreba her candidacy for the Liberals. Buzreba had previously told a fellow Twitter user that they should have been “aborted with a coat hanger.”

Allegedly sexist remarks from ex-Tory candidate Gilles Guibord were even more obscurely found in the comment section of the Journal de Montreal website.

Levy suspects attitudes towards online transgressions will soften somewhat over time as social media becomes more entrenched, saying next decade’s candidates may be able to weather the storms created by relatively benign social media gaffes.

University of Manitoba political communications professor Royce Koop hopes so, fearing relentless criticism of candidates’ every online move could have serious implications for political engagement.

“When we say to people, ‘if you’re going to run for office you better be completely bland and inoffensive,’ they have to start thinking of that 10, 15 years ahead of time,” he said.

“You’re going to get a certain kind of politician that maybe we don’t necessarily want. Maybe we want people that have lived in the real world, they’ve lived real lives, they’ve made mistakes, and we’re willing to forgive them for those mistakes.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/parties-failed-to-check-twitter-its-coming-back-to-bite-them/feed/0Hashtag fails on the 2015 campaign trailhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/hashtag-fails-on-the-2015-campaign-trail/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/hashtag-fails-on-the-2015-campaign-trail/#respondWed, 09 Sep 2015 11:22:02 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=753505As election rumbles on, a list of candidates who have been ensnared in social media gaffes

OTTAWA —Social media accounts give election candidates unparalleled visibility — and as all the major parties know, that isn’t always a good thing.

On Labour Day weekend, the Conservatives were forced to drop Toronto-Danforth candidate Tim Dutaud after he was found to have posted videos of himself making crank calls on YouTube — in one, he posed as a mentally disabled man; in another, he feigned an orgasm.

According to Steve Ladurantaye, head of news and government partnerships at Twitter Canada, such discoveries are unsurprising now that social media has been around long enough that candidates have a decade or more of material stored online.

“You’ve had nine years of Twitter to tweet things with,” he said. “Only a couple of weeks of those were during your campaign when you’re actually thinking about what you’re tweeting from a political standpoint.”

Dutaud’s incident is just the latest in a series of questionable or embarrassing online posts by candidates that have been pounced on by media and opponents during the first weeks of the federal election campaign.

1. The Conservatives showed the door to Montreal candidate Augustin Ali Kitoko after he shared an album of photos from NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s Facebook page.

2. Another Tory candidate in Montreal, Gilles Guibord, was forced to resign over sexist comments he allegedly made in online comments section of the Journal de Montreal newspaper.

3. A young Liberal candidate in Alberta, Ala Buzreba, resigned after four-year-old tweets surfaced of her telling someone they should have been aborted with a coat hanger and another to “go blow your brains out.” She apologized for the comments.

4. An NDP candidate in Nova Scotia, Morgan Wheeldon, was forced to resign after suggesting in a 2014 Facebook post that Israel was engaged in “ethnic cleansing.”

5. Soheil Eid, a candidate in Joliette, Que., apologized twice for a Facebook post that drew a parallel between the words of Mulcair and comments attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s infamous propaganda minister.

7. Wiliam Moughrabi, candidate in the Montreal riding of Ahuntsic-Cartierville, had to erase online comments that were deemed violet and misogynist in nature.

8. VirJiny Provost, a young Bloc candidate in Megantic-L’Erable, embarrassed her party after a survey she answered came to light. Asked what she would need in the event of a nuclear attack, Provost wrote she’d bring “her cellphone, a penis and chips.”

The list of blunders is likely to grow as there are still several weeks left in the marathon campaign.

Ladurantaye said what strikes him most about the campaign is not what he calls “individual bozo moments,” but rather the ability of social media to magnify incidents and even change the campaign.

He pointed to Finance Minister Joe Oliver cancelling a speech at a men’s-only club amid a social media backlash, or the video of now-former Conservative candidate Jerry Bance caught in 2012 in a secret CBC video urinating in a homeowner’s coffee mug.

In the past, such incidents would have made the news for a few days but not necessarily caused resignations or event cancellations, he said.

“Things that would have boiled and disappeared now have a more immediate fallout.”

Update 2: The original version of this post didn’t mention Buzreba’s most controversial tweet, though, honestly, if I’d wanted to cover up for her, I don’t think I’d have linked to the article where her mean tweets are quoted. Still, it’s a fair criticism. So here it is, all the way from ancient 2011.

One thing this controversy demonstrates, of course, is that there’s very little principled opposition to political correctness and apology culture, at least in politics. A lot of articles recently have pointed out how dangerous it is that every statement on Twitter can be used to ruin someone’s life and career, regardless of context or mitigating circumstances. Many of these pieces are about “PC” as a tool used by the left to stifle the right, and they have a point—but here we have Conservatives using it as a tool to embarrass a Liberal candidate. (One of the tweets that got Buzreba in trouble wasn’t even an insult to other people, as some of her other tweets were; it was a joke about how she looks “like a flipping lesbian” with a short haircut. Using an offhand stereotypical joke against someone is often denounced as an example of PC culture.) Public statements are a weapon, and neither side is prepared to disarm. But politicians don’t really think it’s wrong that a few tweets can hurt someone’s career. They just think it’s wrong for their side.

But, accepting that everyone’s public statements will always be fair game, Buzreba’s fate shows why Twitter can look particularly embarrassing on your permanent record. As we all know, and as Buzreba admitted in her inevitable apology, teenagers are even more likely than adults to say stuff without thinking (not that adults are saints, just that we’ve been beaten down by life and we’re more timid). Twitter, which encourages short, pat responses to everything, is perfect for someone who wants to “engage” with people by using one-line insults like “go blow your brains out.”

We’ve been leaving a permanent record online for a long time now, but most of what we said in the past was in longer forms—usenet postings, blog postings, blog comments—where we could qualify what we said, or bring some kind of nuance to it. Someone called out on a nasty Tumblr post can sometimes point to a line in that post that qualifies the statement, softens it. And even when you try to take a small part of a longer post out of context, it’s rarely as ferocious or as generalized as a 140-character tweet tends to be. A tweet is a stand-alone thing, and although the “Twitter essay” has been created as a way of making longer and more nuanced statements in that format, it still winds up being a collection of short, punchy, non-nuanced statements. Twitter’s power comes from its ability to say one thing in the harshest terms possible, which means a tweet from the past can portray you in the harshest possible light.

The problem with playing gotcha with people’s tweets is that it almost discourages people from growing and changing. Buzreba’s tweets were an example of how people who use Twitter can sometimes dehumanize or insult people they disagree with; that’s certainly a problem—but she’s not the same person she was then; she is, or was, running for public office, engaging with the messy real world outside of Twitter.

If we say that saying nasty things on Twitter disqualifies you for public office, then we’re actually encouraging the bad effects of Twitter, because that discourages people from moving beyond the virtue performance and smugness of Twitter. Buzreba may have grown beyond that. But if we hold someone’s Twitter performance against him or her forever, we’re not giving him or her much incentive to do better.

But if we say someone’s tweets are to be held against them forever, even if they come from a younger, less mature version of that person, we might be contributing to the toxic Twitter culture we like to complain about. We’re saying, in effect, that you might as well just play your Twitter role forever, never growing out of it, because we’ll never give you the chance to do better. Basically, we’re shaming people for having been part of the online shaming culture in the past. And that just ensures the shaming culture will continue to thrive.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/twitter-will-ruin-your-life/feed/3Harper’s hockey bet among most popular world leader tweets in 2014http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/harpers-hockey-bet-among-most-popular-world-leader-tweets-in-2014/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/harpers-hockey-bet-among-most-popular-world-leader-tweets-in-2014/#respondTue, 28 Apr 2015 09:42:03 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=712587"Like I said, #teamusa is good but #wearewinter. bBarackObama, I look forward to my two cases of beer. #CANvsUSA #Sochi2014''

]]>OTTAWA – Plenty of diplomatic deals get done on the margins of global get-togethers, but one conducted on Twitter in 2014 made Prime Minister Stephen Harper a digital star among his fellow world leaders.

Harper’s trash-talking tweet to U.S. President Barack Obama about the men’s and women’s hockey finals at the Sochi Olympics was among the most retweeted missives from world leaders last year, according to the annual Twiplomacy study of online activities of global politicians.

The message – “Like I said, #teamusa is good but #wearewinter. bBarackObama, I look forward to my two cases of beer. #CANvsUSA #Sochi2014” – was forwarded more than 23,000 times.

“I am not surprised that the occasional fun and quirky tweets work best, but it doesn’t mean that Twitter is not used for serious exchanges,” said Matthias Luefkens, a digital practice director at global public relations agency Burson-Marsteller, which puts out the study.

Most world leaders use the social media tool to broadcast specific messages; Harper is among many who don’t generally reply when messages are sent their way.

But foreign affairs departments tend to be more engaged. Canada’s is among the most active, with 184 missions and heads of missions on Twitter, second only to the United Kingdom.

Twitter is becoming an essential tool of 21st-century statecraft, the study says, both in terms of public diplomacy and public engagement.

Former foreign affairs minister John Baird in part led the charge for Canada. After suspending diplomatic ties with Iran, Baird spearheaded a campaign to use social media to reach regular citizens of that country in 2013 during the presidential election.

In 2014, Canada was part of a co-ordinated campaign led by the U.S. State Department to use the hashtag #UnitedforUkraine in order to register their official unease over Russia’s actions there.

Not to be outdone, the study noted, the Russian government started using the hashtag as well to provide its point of view.

“Of course, hashtags alone will not bring back the girls from captivity in Nigeria or bring peace to Ukraine,” the study said.

“However, they serve as a powerful rallying cry on specific issues and causes, and help give them international recognition as a trending topic on Twitter.”

Harper had his own online dig at the Russian government, pointedly unfollowing its prime minister on Twitter last year. Dmitry Medvedev no longer follows Harper either.

Baird stepped down as foreign affairs minister earlier this year. So far, successor Rob Nicholson has not shown the same proclivity for building a presence online.

The study notes that Nicholson only follows three other foreign affairs ministers and rarely tweets himself, though the official Canadian foreign-policy Twitter account follows 47 similar departments around the world.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/harpers-hockey-bet-among-most-popular-world-leader-tweets-in-2014/feed/0Richard III: Dead king live tweets his final dayshttp://www.macleans.ca/society/newsmaker-richard-iii-speaks-in-140-characters-or-less/
http://www.macleans.ca/society/newsmaker-richard-iii-speaks-in-140-characters-or-less/#respondWed, 25 Mar 2015 08:38:56 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=697555Final words — from the grave — in 140 characters or less

]]>While the remains of King Richard III are being viewed by thousands in Leicester Cathedral, the dead king is live tweeting his final days before being buried. Using the Twitter handle of @Richard_third, he describes himself as “former king of england, leicesterian, I’m gunna get you henry tudor, not the views of the current royal family. (they are imposters!), Last of the Plantagenets.”

The account popped up in September 2012, the month the king’s bones were exhumed from that famous parking lot in Leicester. And though he’d tweeted regularly in subsequent years, it went into overdrive on Sunday when the coffin was moved from the university to Bosworth Field, where he was killed, then finally to the cathedral.

It was just over there . . . just by that tree, that’s where he stabbed me from behind . . . *shudder* #dickysdodgytour—Richard III (@richard_third) March 22, 2015

And it’s not all about him. He’s aware that 530 years have passed since he was slain. So for those queuing for hours, he issued a series of recommendations, including a visit to the cathedral gift shop on the way out. (He’s partial to the hoodie.)

3, No selfie sticks, no baseball hats, no goths. Nothing personal but I hate Goths.—Richard III (@richard_third) March 23, 2015

He’s even engaged in a Twitter war with Henry VIII, the son of the man who killed him. Apparently, there are no hard feelings, especially since Richard III is now more popular than the rotund Tudor.

Didn’t involve 7000 people though eh? “@KngHnryVIII: What a day. So much living, learning, laughing & loving. But mostly getting fat.”—Richard III (@richard_third) March 24, 2015

Following dead people or deities is nothing new on Twitter. Everyone from Shakespeare (@Wmm_Shakespeare) to Socrates (@Socrrates) has an account. Towering above them all, metaphysically and in more practical ways, is God (@thetweetofgod), with more than 1.8 million followers. The self-proclaimed “dope-ass divinity, trollin’ with My trinity, droppin’ top tweets in your immediate vicinity, flingin’ fly phrases from the fringes of infinity” follows only one person: Justin Bieber.

This Richard III may be the hot one today, but he isn’t alone. Another Richard III account started big, but soon died (again).

As for the “current” Richard III, well, he has one goal (beyond being properly buried on Thursday).

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/newsmaker-richard-iii-speaks-in-140-characters-or-less/feed/0TSN tweet shows Twitter no Wild West when it comes to libel lawhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/tsn-tweet-shows-twitter-no-wild-west-when-it-comes-to-libel-law/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/tsn-tweet-shows-twitter-no-wild-west-when-it-comes-to-libel-law/#respondThu, 05 Mar 2015 10:26:42 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=688631TSN apologized earlier this week after a tweet from a fan about Maple Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf, Joffrey Lupul and his wife ran on a live crawl

]]>VANCOUVER – An inflammatory tweet that appeared on TSN has served as a reminder that while social media may appear to be a lawless land filled with snark, vitriol and half-truths, it’s also subject to the same scrutiny – and libel laws – as newspapers or television.

TSN apologized earlier this week after a tweet from a fan about Maple Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf, his wife Elisha Cuthbert and forward Joffrey Lupul ran on a live crawl at the bottom of the screen during Monday’s NHL trade deadline show.

The apology followed a legal threat from a lawyer representing Phaneuf, Cuthbert and Lupul.

“That’s the main goal: you want to just end the story,” said the trio’s lawyer, Peter Gall. “There’s just no truth to it.”

Gall threatened legal action this week against the network and the tweeter, Anthony Adragna.

The network said the tweet was broadcast despite protocols to prevent inappropriate social media posts from making it to air, though they haven’t explained how the offending post made it onto live TV. TSN has said it will no longer air public tweets during live coverage.

Gall said Phaneuf and Cuthbert had grown familiar with “outrageous” false statements being made about them online, but seeing them broadcast on TSN was the final straw.

“You can’t sue everybody who says something to you for defamation, but there reaches a point where you just have to do something. That point was reached once it was re-published on TSN,” he said.

While TSN already apologized, Gall said he’s hopeful he will also reach a resolution with Adragna’s lawyer soon. Adragna did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Twitter, but he has since deleted the post.

Defamation lawyer Peter Downard stressed that the same libel test applies everywhere, even on Twitter. If a reasonable person could consider a statement to be damaging to another’s reputation, then it can be the subject of a defamation lawsuit.

Downard said a defamation lawsuit can be successful whether a tweet is seen by 100 people or 1 million, though he added that the amount of damages awarded would likely be smaller if the audience is smaller.

“People have to understand that when they are publishing on the Internet, through whatever type of Internet communication, they’re publishing to the world at large,” he said.

“They can hurt people and they can be held responsible for that. It’s not the Wild West. It’s not a situation where they can act with impunity.”

Downard said defamation cases involving tweets were not rare at this point, as he had been involved in several. But he said most tend to be resolved outside the court system, with an apology or removal of the offending material.

Two years ago, former Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke sued 18 anonymous online commenters for defamation over allegations of an affair with Rogers Sportsnet sports reporter Hazel Mae. He has since tracked some of the commenters down.

Burke was also represented by Gall, who said the goal was the same: the stop the rumours from spreading.

A ruling this week would appear to point to some latitude being given to Internet comments. A judge ruled that while Ottawa blogger Dr. Dawg was defamed on a conservative message board, the statements fell within the bounds of fair comment.

Madam Justice Heidi Polowin dismissed the blogger’s legal claim, noting debate in the blogosphere can be “rude,” “aggressive,” and “sarcastic,” The judge said fair comment should be given a broad interpretation in such a context.

But Vancouver-based defamation lawyer Roger McConchie said the ruling shouldn’t be taken as a get-out-of-jail-free card for online defamation.

He said every libel case is unique. While a judge will always consider context, the circumstances of a Twitter comment are unlikely to be identical to the message boards in the Dr. Dawg case, especially given the 140-character limit.

“The fact that there’s a lot of insane libelling going on on the Internet isn’t a defence if somebody who is targeted by your tweet decides to take you on in court,” he said.

“You can’t say, ‘Well, there are a thousand other people publishing a thousand other defamatory tweets every hour.’ That isn’t going to be a defence.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/tsn-tweet-shows-twitter-no-wild-west-when-it-comes-to-libel-law/feed/0The secret of Norm Macdonald’s new successhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/the-secret-of-norm-macdonalds-new-success/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/the-secret-of-norm-macdonalds-new-success/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 11:31:28 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=661027Macdonald has found a new outlet on Twitter, where his earnest, long-form stories entertain and move his 450K followers

Norm Macdonald has found a new life on Twitter, where his earnest, long-form stories entertain and move his many followers. In his latest, at the bottom of this post, he writes about his work on Saturday Night Live‘s 40th-anniversary show.

Norm Macdonald has never had a hit TV show. The Norm Show, a comedy about a disgraced hockey star, lasted a few years in the early 2000s. His sitcom A Minute with Stan Hooper was cancelled after one season in 2003. Comedy Central cancelled the Sports Show with Norm Macdonald in 2011 after only nine episodes. Recently, however, the Quebec-born stand-up legend has found a new outlet away from the stage and TV cameras: on Twitter.

After the death of the famous No. 4 for the Montreal Canadians—Jean Béliveau—and with the legendary No. 9, Gordie Howe, still very ill, Macdonald used a series of tweets to pay tribute to both. “4 is gone. 9 hangs on. // Ice is beautiful but hard. // Remember the Colisée de Quebec? //Remember the pee-wee tourney every year? // Remember the Ramparts? // Remember Lafleur? // When you skate there is no earth, there is ice, ice your feet never touch. // When you skate, you soar above the world and do not touch it. // I need to find a rink, now, and skate, and forget. 4 is gone and 9 hangs on.”

While Twitter’s 140-character limit is perfect for short, comical musings, Macdonald opts for earnest, long-form stories. They are beautiful—poetic, even. He’s not trying to be funny, and it may be his best work yet.

“Everybody thinks of him as this very acrid personality that they saw on Saturday Night Live, but he’s got this other side to him that comes out in certain places,” says Yuk Yuk’s co-founder Mark Breslin, who gave the comic his first paid gig in stand-up.

“When he was a kid, in Grade 1 or 2, he’d go into his room and he made up these stories—Icelandic sagas, really—that just went on and on and on,” says his brother, the TV journalist Neil Macdonald. “He would handwrite them out—25, 30, 35 pages—that had nothing to do with school. He was kind of famous in our house for doing them.”

Macdonald seemed poised for superstardom—he rose to fame in the ’90s as anchor on SNL’s fake news segment, “Weekend Update,” then, after being fired, starred in the cult-classic comedy Dirty Work, and even returned to SNL as a guest host. Yet he never reached the same heights as other SNL alumni.

Despite now being an “old chunk of coal,” as he playfully referred to himself on Conan O’Brien’s show, Macdonald’s fan support is young, steadfast and media-savvy. When CBS’s Late Late Show was searching for a new host, his fans lobbied for him as the replacement with the Twitter hashtag #latelatenormnorm. (The position was filled by James Corden.) After Jian Ghomeshi’s fall left CBC Radio’s Q without a host, Macdonald wrote in a tweet (since deleted), “I love the show @CBCRadioQ and would love to be its host.” His fans created a movement with the hashtag #Norm4Q.

They’re unlikely to succeed. True, the video podcast he hosts, Norm Macdonald Live, with long interviews with guests such as Adam Sandler and Russell Brand, gets more than 300,000 views. But “part of the way these shows are able to exist is people do ads for them. That’s been a real challenge with Norm,” says Daniel Kellison, the podcast’s executive producer, referring to Macdonald’s advertising bit for a grilling set. “Right after the most disgusting off-colour story from Nick Swardson, [Norm] basically went into the live-read: ‘Hey, what about the ManGrate?’ ” The advertiser didn’t share his sense of humour. “We had to pay them back,” Kellison says.

But the fact that you never know what Macdonald will say next drives his popularity. His world remains an unscripted one—and, in an era where celebrities pay people to tweet for them, his fans wouldn’t have it any other way.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canadas-cabinet-ministers-must-tweet-in-english-and-francais/feed/0Oil gets back to the business of fallinghttp://www.macleans.ca/economy/oil-gets-back-to-the-business-of-falling/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/oil-gets-back-to-the-business-of-falling/#respondThu, 05 Feb 2015 08:53:34 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=675217Feb. 5: Plus, a tax crackdown in China, a $15 million bill for The Interview, and chewing up Wrigley's profits

Oil had lost nine per cent by the end of yesterday, and the price is now back under $50 and has been vacillating on both sides of $48 so far this morning.

The cause? A reversal of hopeful assumption-making, because a drop in the number of U.S. rigs does not automatically equal a drop in production. American crude stocks once again broke records, with production hitting more than $413 million barrels last week, the highest weekly number since records began in 1982. A strengthening U.S. dollar probably didn’t help.

The loonie responded by wiping out recent gains, dropping more than a cent to close the day below 80 cents, again. The TSX also dropped by almost 70 points, which kept much of the three-digit gains of the last few days.

What’s on today? In the U.K., the Bank of England will make its interest-rate announcement. The rate is expected to stay at 0.5 per cent, but as central banks have reminded us lately, expectations are often wrong (see: Bank of Canada, Australia, Russia.) Today we also have international trade numbers for Canada, fourth-quarter productivity numbers for the U.S., and numbers on the health of the eurozone’s retail sector.

Oh, so you want to play? The Greek government is playing hardball – and the European Central Bank has decided to take them up on it. The ECB says they will no longer accept Greek bonds in exchange for providing commercial loans to Greek banks. This could force banks to go to the Greek central bank for loans, but those cost a full 1.5 per cent more than the ECB’s rate. This is a big, big problem for Greece, because it means they could run out of cash, and fast. Bloombergquotes (anonymous) sources saying that this could happen within three weeks, but regardless of the timeline, it would be soon. The ECB’s message? If you want our money, play by our rules. Stay tuned for more high-stakes monetary drama today, as the Greek finance minister prepares to meet the German finance minister – his No. 1 critic.

China gets tough on (some) tax dodgers, lowers capital requirements. A lot of movement in China today, as the country’s tax authorities pledge to crack down on companies who are not paying the proper amount of tax. The move is focused on foreign companies operating in China, not Chinese companies evading tax elsewhere, and comes just days after Obama announced his plan to tax American companies’ offshore profits. In response to slowing growth – at 7.4 per cent, it’s the lowest rate of growth since 1990 – the People’s Bank of China also lowered the amount of money Chinese commercial banks must keep on hand, in an attempt to increase cash flow.

Sony spent $15 million dealing with The Interview, and Twitter reports today.Tech week is actually continuing this week: Twitter will report their earnings today, and the pressure is on to prove they’re actually bringing in profits and mainstream, active users – people other than, say, journalists, for example. The forecast is that Twitter brought in $440 to $450 million in revenue, but the company is still struggling to really make money from the service. Sony reported their earnings yesterday, with a mixed bag: net profits for the last quarter were twice what they were in the comparable quarter last year, despite a $15-million price tag for dealing with the fall out from TheInterview debacle.But the company is still expected to post a loss at the end of their financial year in March, and plans to lay off more than 2,000 staff.

North Americans are chewing less gum. And that means Wrigley, the gum brand owned by Mars, is closing its Toronto factory, which has been in operation half a century, and laying off 383 people. The popularity of gum in Canada has been falling for three straight years, and the trend is similar in the U.S., a shift an analyst in the Globe attributed to Millennials’ changing snacking habits, which include less smoking and a belief that chomping at the office is rude. But in other parts of the world, especially China, gum remains hugely popular. Gum brands are still the candy of choice in many other countries, from Mexico to Brazil to France (check out this candy slideshow!)

]]>SEOUL, Korea – Facebook said it suffered a self-inflicted outage lasting an hour on Tuesday that made its site inaccessible to users worldwide.

The glitch reported in Canada, the United States, Asia, Australia and the U.K. affected access from PCs and Facebook’s mobile app. The social media giant’s Instagram service was also inaccessible.

A Facebook statement said the disruption was caused by a technical change it made to the site and not the result of a cyberattack. Lizard Squad, a group notorious for attention seeking antics online, claimed responsibility on Twitter for the outages.

“The downtime was caused by a technical issue we introduced. It was not connected to Lizard Squad, Snowmageddon, or any other external party,” Facebook said.

The temporary loss of service may be Facebook’s biggest outage since Sept. 24, 2010 when it was down for about 2.5 hours.

The statement said users would have been shut out of Facebook for roughly 50 minutes. On its website for developers, Facebook said the “major outage” lasted one hour.

Facebook has about 1.35 billion active users and Instagram has some 300 million.

News of the Facebook outage set rival social network Twitter alight, propelling the hashtag “facebookdown” to top trend on the site. It comes ahead of Facebook reporting its quarterly earnings on Wednesday.

As access to Facebook returned, some users in Asia reported that the site was loading slowly or not offering full functionality.

Lizard Squad on Monday claimed responsibility for defacing the Malaysia Airlines website and has said it will release data from the airline. The group has claimed responsibility for a variety of hacks over the past year, most of them aimed at gaming or media companies.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/facebook-instagram-suffer-self-inflicted-hour-long-outage/feed/0The ideologies of Canadian economists, according to Twitterhttp://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/the-ideologies-of-canadian-economists-according-to-twitter/
http://www.macleans.ca/economy/economicanalysis/the-ideologies-of-canadian-economists-according-to-twitter/#respondFri, 09 Jan 2015 23:31:09 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=662665From left to right, where economists in Canada fall on the ideological spectrum based on who follows them on Twitter

How left-wing or right-wing are economists relative to their peers? Short of asking them all, one creative way to find out could be to look at who follows them on Twitter.

In a new post at the Institute for Research on Public Policy blog, Stephen Tapp, a research director at IRPP, offers a snapshot of the ideological landscape of Canada’s think tanks. (His full post appears below.)

To do this, he tracked the Twitter followers of 42 various think tanks, and determined how much overlap there is with those who follow two of Canada’s most ideologically different think tanks, the right-of centre Fraser Institute and the left-of-centre Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Going on the well-documented premise that on social media, as in real life, people are drawn to those who think like they do, the more followers a think tank shares with Fraser versus CCPA, the more we can infer its ideological bent.

Then some curious economists started asking Tapp where they landed on the spectrum, so he thought it would be fun to take the experiment a step further. That lead him to examine the Twitter followers of nearly 80 individual economists, hailing from organizations as diverse as universities, think tanks, banks and unions. Once again, he looked for overlaps with those who follow the Fraser Institute and CCPA. Tapp shared the data with Maclean’s, which we used to create this interactive chart of the inferred ideologies of Canadian economists who are on Twitter.
(You can also view the chart here.)

For best results on mobile, view chart in landscape mode.

To understand the vertical axis, here’s a personal example. According to Tapp, based on the make-up of my Twitter followers, I score 7.8 per cent (0.078) right of centre. There is a 12.6 per cent overlap between my followers and those of the Fraser Institute, while there’s a smaller 4.8 per cent overlap on the CCPA side. So 12.6 minus 4.8 = 7.8 (0.078). Incidentally, that jives with where I expected to be.

The horizontal axis, meanwhile, is the economists’ ranking across the left-right spectrum.

Tapp says there are obvious caveats to this approach, which he spells out in detail in his post below. Any discussion about ideology is certain to be complex and sensitive. And he urges readers against using this information to judge or criticize the research of these economists.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting and entertaining experiment that reveals the power of social media data.

What can a little birdie tell us about think tank ideology?

This simple measure of think tank ideology uses social media data from Twitter and the natural tendency for like-minded people to associate.

By Stephen Tapp

There are many think tanks in Canada. They have varied objectives, work on myriad public policy issues and have vastly different operating models, but in how they describe themselves to the general public, they largely sound the same.

Think tanks say that they’re independent and non-partisan; they say they’re not left-wing or right-wing, but that they’re evidence-based. However, the media often portrays think tanks not in a neutral way, but as purveyors of opposing ideological viewpoints. The usual right-versus-left convention might make for entertaining television — and by presenting “balanced” viewpoints media outlets can say that they too are unbiased — but it doesn’t necessarily generate better policy discussions.

Moreover, this pretense that no think tank has an “ideology” generates significant confusion and makes it hard for the public to know a given think tank’s underlying disposition. When TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin had a show about think tanks in November 2014, the producers felt it necessary to provide a useful cheat sheet on the program’s blog (from Donald Abelson of Western University) to help viewers navigate these murky waters. A list classified several Canadian think tanks as “right,” “centre” and “left” on the ideological spectrum. They acknowledged that these categories were problematic and subjective, but they thought that such classifications were a useful road map for disoriented viewers, and that by posting this list they might start a conversation about how the general public views think tanks.

In this article, I contribute a simple measure of think tank ideology to the discussion. It uses social media data from Twitter and hinges on important assumptions about the ideological leanings of two particular think tanks and about the structure of social networks. Before getting to the results, let’s first review some key players (where I adopt a broad definition of think tanks that includes a few industry organizations and others that are not strictly “research” groups) and explain the basic approach.

These results are not meant to be exhaustive, or the final word on the subject; they are simply an effort to develop some preliminary data. My goal is to assign numbers to things that we can’t observe and that think tanks generally won’t tell us.

Figure 1, which ranks the top 25 think tanks in Canada based on their Twitter followers, identifies many of the highest-profile organizations that are active on the Twitter site (to see the full names of the organizations, see table 1).

This figure simply reports each think tank’s number of followers, but I wondered whether these followers might reveal something about the think tanks themselves. Therefore, I chose two of the most visible, highly followed organizations — the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) — as reference points. In the media, the Fraser Institute often represents the “right-of-centre” viewpoint and CCPA the “left-of-centre” viewpoint. So, for the sake of argument, I follow this convention. (My apologies; this will surely offend some people.)

If a think tank has more followers in common with Fraser than with CCPA, then I infer that it appeals more to “right-of-centre” followers and therefore label it as “right-of-centre.” Those whose followers overlap more closely with CCPA’s are inferred to be “left-of-centre.” This uses the concept of homophily, which is the natural tendency for like-minded people to associate and herd together and is often found in social network studies. For instance, consider recent research by Yosh Halberstam and Brian Knight, which used Twitter data to study the U.S. 2012 election. They estimated that of those Twitter accounts identified as being held by conservative voters, 80 per cent of the people they follow (“followees”) were also conservative; and among liberal voters, 67 percent of their followees were also liberal.

Assuming that this basic characteristic of networks applies to the social networks of Canadian public policy types allows me to make progress toward quantifying and attempting to uncover the messy construct of hidden think tank ideology. Of course, where my assumptions are wrong, the results will be unreliable.

Two examples illustrate my basic approach, which uses data from the amazing tool Followerwonk. First, of the 2,155 followers of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI),

744 (34.5 percent) also follow Fraser, but not CCPA (area A);

128 (5.9 percent) also follow CCPA, but not Fraser (area B); and

294 (13.6 percent) also follow CCPA and Fraser (area C) (figure 2).

My measure of inferred ideology basically takes area A (as a share of the think tank’s total followers to represent its right-wing measure) and subtracts area B (as share of its overall followers for its left-wing measure). So 34 per cent minus six per cent results in a measure of roughly 28 per cent, which is the extent to which MLI can be labelled a “right-wing” think tank based on this approach.

In the second example (figure 3), the followers of the Broadbent Institute overlap much more with CCPA (30 per cent are in area B) than with the Fraser Institute (four per cent are in area A). Not surprisingly, then, the Broadbent Institute falls on the left of the spectrum with a score of roughly 4 minus 30 equals -26 per cent.

When the (absolute values of) think tanks’ ideology scores are sorted along a left-right continuum, they can be seen as a “think tank smile” (figure 4).

With this metric, we can group the think tanks into the conventional “left,” “centre” and “right” boxes. Those with the highest “left-wing” scores are the Caledon Institute, the Broadbent Institute, the Council of Canadians, Democracy Watch, the Parkland Institute, the Mowat Centre, Samara, the Ecofiscal Commission and Sustainable Prosperity.

Think tanks in the “centre” include Canada 2020, the Martin Prosperity Institute, the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP), the Public Policy Forum (PPF), the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Canadian International Council (CIC).

Think tanks with the highest “right-wing” scores are the Manning Centre, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), the MLI, the C.D. Howe Institute (CDHI), the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI), the Canada West Foundation and the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies.

Four additional results are worth highlighting. First, there are indeed many Canadian think tanks: these results include 44. Having such a crowded playing field may explain much of the general public’s confusion about which think tank fits in where ideologically.

Second, according to my ideology measure, Canadian think tanks seem to be about evenly split on the left-right continuum: there are 21 think tanks to the left of centre and 23 to the right.

Third, the smile isn’t exactly symmetric. In this sample, and with this measure, the average “right-wing” think tank appears to be a bit more “ideological” than the average “left-wing” think tank. That said, the difference is not that large and may simply reflect what Halberstam and Knight found in the US: that conservatives are actually more tightly connected on social media than liberals.

Fourth, my preliminary analysis did not suggest any systematic relationship between ideology and Twitter followers. In other words, it does not appear that more extreme ideologies on their own are associated with a larger Twitter following.

More detailed results are shown in table 1. The left-centre-right classifications shown here match Abelson’s list remarkably closely and likely confirm what policy wonks already think. This list also gives a sense of magnitude to allow for finer relative rankings, which may also be useful for policy wonks and the general public alike.

That said, we should always be careful when reducing a complex issue to a single number along a single dimension. The concept of ideology is inevitably problematic. Moreover, think tank ideologies are not uniform within a given organization and they change over time. Finally, of course, readers should not use these results to prejudge, discredit or approve of research by any of these organizations without a thorough reading of that research. I emphasize that these simple results are preliminary and just a first step; much more work is needed to better understand these complex issues.

Stephen Tapp is a research director at the Institute for Research on Public Policy. Follow him on Twitter @stephen_tapp, or email him at: stapp@irpp.org. These views are his alone and not those of the Institute.

OTTAWA — When a minister tweets, is it ever really a personal account, or should he or she be required to abide by federal laws and responsibilities?

Those blurred lines around government information have raised questions since social media came on the scene, and are now getting a closer look from an unexpected corner.

Canada’s commissioner of official languages has launched an investigation into John Baird’s Twitter account to determine if the foreign affairs minister is running afoul of federal laws around bilingual communication.

Graham Fraser had received a complaint that Baird’s tweets were often only in English, and decided the situation was worthy of further scrutiny.

The case is being used by the watchdog’s office to examine the larger issue of ministerial social media accounts and whether they fall under the Official Languages Act.

Baird’s department has responded by saying that the Twitter account in question — @HonJohnBaird — is his personal account, and does not fall within the ambit of the Official Languages Act.

Baird’s Twitter profile describes him as “Canada’s foreign minister and MP for Nepean-Carleton.” A majority of his posts are on foreign affairs issues; some are repeated in French, others are not. Some tweets appear only in English on his personal account, and then are posted in French on the department’s Twitter account.

Baird had a previous Twitter account, @JohnBairdOWN, which is now defunct.

“We are surprised that the official languages commissioner has chosen to investigate the Minister’s personal Twitter account that falls outside of the scope of the Act,” said Baird’s spokesman Rick Roth.

“The Minister’s personal Twitter account is just that, his personal account. That said, he tweets from that account in both of Canada’s official languages.”

The issue of personal versus public has also come up with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s social media accounts, which include a mix of official and partisan messages. His office has argued that as both prime minister and leader of the Conservative party he must dabble in both, saying there is nothing untoward about government staff overseeing his posts on official matters.

Likewise, Harper’s weekly video diary, 24/Seven, is published to YouTube by bureaucrats using taxpayer-paid resources, but includes content taken by political staff, such as footage of the prime minister’s wife Laureen.

Still, MPs and ministers often change their Twitter addresses altogether during election campaigns, ostensibly to draw the line between their official government profiles and their partisan ones.

]]>HALIFAX – A top judge in Nova Scotia says he is surprised at the positive impact live-tweeting inside the courtroom has had after the province’s judiciary recently relaxed the rules on the use of Twitter in the courts.

“I couldn’t get over how well it had worked,” Kennedy said in an interview, describing it as the closest thing to gavel-to-gavel coverage he has seen.

“I didn’t think it was going to be as accurate as it turned out to be. I have to say that I was very impressed.

“I’d come back (to my office) occasionally and go on the computer after I’d been to the courtroom — I’d tell my colleagues that I used to have to come back here to find out what happened,” he said, kidding.

New guidelines governing the use of electronic devices in the courtroom came into effect in Nova Scotia on May 15, allowing communication such as tweeting and texting for any purpose, including publication, in most courts, unless otherwise banned by the presiding judge.

The policy places restrictions on tweeting from youth, mental health and family courts, and do not affect statutory publication bans, including revealing the identity of youths or sexual assault victims.

During the Howe case, senior Crown attorney Darcy MacPherson used printouts of a reporter’s tweets as a set of reference notes.

“I was on a break on the weekend and I went online … and it dawned on me at that moment: I have a great asset here. It’s something that I’ll be able to make use of,” he said.

MacPherson, who had never looked at Twitter prior to the case, said the tweets served as another set of objective eyes, allowing him to catch things he and his co-counsel may have missed.

Though his notes remained his primary source of information, MacPherson said he was struck by the usefulness of this second, objective account.

Though he has yet to sign up on to the social media site, he said he can see lawyers increasingly taking advantage of reporters’ tweets in the future.

Kennedy said allowing Twitter into the courtroom is part of the legal system’s quest to improve access to justice.

“That’s not just a matter of making it easier for people to come before the courts from the point of view of expense and time and that kind of thing, but also better communication of what we do,” he said.

“I think that an informed public would agree most of the time with what we’re trying to do,” he added. “Tweeting, that’s all part of that.”

Kennedy said he would like to go further. He said he intends to introduce video broadcasting of criminal court proceedings, though he added he would likely begin with a sentencing hearing to avoid the risk of negatively impacting witnesses.

“Does anybody think that 25 years from now there won’t be television in those courtrooms?”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/nova-scotia-judge-impressed-with-courtroom-tweets/feed/1Mapped: Who follows federal party leaders on Twitter?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/mapped-political-tweets/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/mapped-political-tweets/#respondFri, 27 Jun 2014 19:22:09 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=575069Harper's popular in the west and Trudeau takes the east